Freespacenotifier KDED module in kdereview

[Lubos Lunak]

On Monday 17 of May 2010, Jacopo De Simoi wrote:
> I've a question about this module, as far as I can understand it polls  the
> disk on which $HOME is mounted every minute to check the available disk
> space. This is something we carefully avoided to do in the plasma device
> notifier because by doing so we keep the disks awake instead of letting
> them sleep if unused if the user desires so. This module would probably
> upset laptop users, am I right? (ervin?)

 Do you have some more details on this? I tried to keep my HDD spun down after 
I had bought SSD and there was always something that kept spinning it up, so 
eventually I've given up and I keep it unmounted until needed. As far as I 
know laptops have a special mode for allowing them to spin down the drive 
that does more aggressive caching and I don't understand why free space, 
which is something very easy to cache, should keep the actual drive active.

> I would personally  like to have the service disabled _at the very least_
> if running on batteries (you can get an idea of how to do it by looking at
> how it's done for the strigi indexer),

 If we really need to do this by hand, could this be done somewhere in the 
framework? I can't imagine this would be the only place in KDE that'd need 
adjusting.

> and  to check available space less 
> often than every minute in the general case.

 No, and actually even a minute is not that short. The point of the service is 
to avoid running out of space in $HOME, which can lead to loss of data as a 
consequence of that. And running out of space is quite easy, a download 
running in background, compilation, whatever. Which means the service should 
ideally check all the time, everything (and that means doing it in KIO is not 
enough). And having it disabled by default makes including it pointless, how 
many users will turn it on? About the same number as those that turn on 
quotas.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 openSUSE Boosters team, KDE developer
 l.lunak at suse.cz , l.lunak at kde.org