Files panel: Automount locations on access

[Mathias Brodala]

If a user enters a location and thus tries to access it, that request should trigger an automatic mount and authentication prompt if necessary.

Attached is a simple example for accessing an FTP server anonymously.

[Johannes Sasongko (sjohannes)]

As discussed in IRC, as far as I know, all remote-mounting actions in other apps are either done at startup (a la /etc/fstab) or explicitly. For example, even in Windows you have to mount a disconnected smb location (by double-clicking the drive in Windows Explorer) before any file access is allowed. GNOME has a similar mechanism where you mount remote shares from the Places menu; I believe apps will not try to do this automatically when you try to access a file/location within the share.

The question is whether there's a good reason for this, or if it's just something nobody has bothered to change.

One problem I can imagine is that, once we are done with the remote mount (e.g. the user closes Exaile), we have no idea whether to unmount, because other apps may already depend on the remote location being available. Not unmounting means leaving a mount that the user may not be aware of. Unmounting means possibly causing errors in other running apps.