Desktop suggests using "eject" in the drive icons context menu, but it is missing

[David Balažic]

Feisty beta desktop CD i386, live boot.

If I plug in an USB flash drive (key), then remove it after about 10 or more seconds, a popup appears, saying that I should use the "Eject" option in the drive icons context menu.

But there is no "Eject" in that menu.
Thou there is "Unmount Volume"...

[Matthias Urlichs (smurf)]

"Eject" seems to have gone missing here too.

This is a problem for two reasons:

- on USB sticks with more than one partition, previously "Eject" unmounted all partitions. Without "Eject" I need to right-click on each of them. That's a usability regression.

- On iPods and other sticks with an "safe/unsafe-to-remove" display, software ejection causes that display to changefrom Unsafe to Safe. That's a worse regression because there's sometimes a nontrivial interval during which the system still flushes data to disk after an unmount/eject command. iPods do not have a blinking disk access light and there's no other way to find out whether you've waited long enough.

The "eject" command-line tool still does the right thing, so something seems to have changed lately which now causes G-V-M to miss the fact that the volume is on an ejectable medium.

[Matthias Urlichs (smurf)]

… possible data loss on iPods and similar devices.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Data loss is a red herring IMHO, but I agree that the previous behaviour with ejection was better.

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

 hal (0.5.8.1-4ubuntu12) feisty; urgency=low
 .
   * Add debian/patches/66-NULL-fstype-crash.patch: Do not crash on NULL
     volume.fstypes, and assing some fallback values to them. Patch from Danny
     Kukawa in FD#10429. (LP: #87800)
   * debian/patches/24_ignored_volumes.patch: Ignore partitions which are
     mounted by default in /etc/fstab only when they are not currently mounted
     (this could happen on damaged partitions, failed fsck, etc., and
     inexperienced users should not randomly mount those.). Since this would
     make system partitions visible, limit the visible ones to /media/ again,
     as in previous Ubuntu releases. (LP: #73227)
   * Add debian/10-storage-policy.fdi: Resurrect 'Eject all USB and Firewire
     storage devices', just as in previous Ubuntu releases. (LP: #97366)
   * Add debian/patches/67-fix-probe-volume.patch: Attempt to fix scrambled
     labels. Taken from FD#10362, thanks to Danny Kukawa. (LP: #69914)

[Matthias Urlichs (smurf)]

I have personally seen the "unmount USB stick" => "vanishes from desktop" => "LED is blinking like crazy for another fifteen seconds" situation.

I don't even want to speculate what would have happened if that had been an iPod.

[Alex Murray (alexmurray)]

This 'fix' has caused a number of other problems - see: #99498 https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/hal/+bug/99498