Suggestion to Remove KFloppy and hold back K3b

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi Wolfgang,

What would you say about using Solid to probe floppy drives? I think
Solid already has the necessary hooks, but if it doesn't, we can add
them.

Thanks,
Boudhayan

Freundliche Grüße
Boudhayan Gupta
KDE e.V. - Sysadmin and Community Working Groups
+49 151 71032970


On 15 February 2017 at 19:50, Wolfgang Bauer <wbauer at tmo.at> wrote:
> On 11 February 2017 at 13:44, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
>> I recommend KFloppy be removed from Applications releases.  It
>> couldn't find my floppy drive and when I hacked the code to tell it
>> where to look it depended on an external tool fdformat which didn't
>> work anyway.
>
> KFloppy and fdformat work fine here in openSUSE, I do use it regularly (with
> an internal floppy drive).
>
> And as the current maintainer, I'd prefer to (try to) fix problems instead of
> having it dropped.
>
> I'm a bit surprised that in the test the floppy drive showed up as /dev/sdc
> though, mine always have been and still are at /dev/fd0...
> I suppose that was an external one?
> Not sure how to fix that then, it supposedly can be a random /dev/sdX...
>
> There is a (somewhat "hidden") feature though to use any device you want: just
> enter it into the text field (this is mentioned in the documentation, it's a
> rather old feature already and intended to be able to format USB sticks too,
> or other unpartitioned devices).
> It would definitely be possible to list all /dev/sdX devices in the chooser
> too, but that may be dangerous and cause data loss without any further check
> that it is really a floppy drive (or USB stick).
> I have to think about that one.
>
> I am aware of one particular problem related to permissions though:
> Normally the device can only be accessed by members of the group "disk" (or
> "floppy"), but modern distributions tend to not add users to these groups any
> more.
>
> You'd have to add the user to the appropriate group manually to make KFloppy
> and fdformat work, or run KFloppy as root.
> Not great, I agree.
>
> Actually I was thinking about this problem recently though.
>
> The error message could definitely be improved.
>
> And one "solution" would probably be to make KFloppy offer to restart itself
> as root (if it detects insufficient permissions) like partitionmanager does
> it.
> Or maybe use kauth to run the external commands as root.
>
> I will work on that.
>
> Suggestion would of course be welcome (for both problems).
>
> Btw, fdformat is only used for a "Full Format".
> A "Quick Format" uses mkfs and friends instead, and "Zero out" uses dd.
> The same permissions problem would apply there though of course.
> (just like as you would run partitionmanager as user)
>
>> It's only feature is to format a disc and arguably
>> support could be added to partitonmanager although it didn't work when
>> I tried it.
>
> Well, personally I would find it a bit overkill to run a tool like
> partitionmanager to format a floppy disk.
> And it's probably not really obvious either, as a floppy disk normally doesn't
> have partitions.
>
>> We seem to have no great solution to playing audio CDs, dragonplayer
>> doesn't understand playlists so can't select a track, amarok doesn't
>> see any tracks
>
> Amarok does see audio CD tracks here, but as it is still KDE4 based it also
> requires a KDE4 based kio_audiocd which is no longer part of KDE Applications.
>
> We still package the last released one as kio_audiocd4 in openSUSE (mainly for
> amarok actually)...
>
> Kind Regards,
> Wolfgang
>