Comment 10 for bug 58706

I have a phone which can serve as USB storage with two partitions. My observations:

* Right click in Nautilus has Unmount, not Eject; each partition is unmounted separately; the phone display does not change from the connected state. I will call that operation "unmount".

* 'eject /dev/sdb1' or 'eject /dev/sdc1' do only the unmount, with a message: eject: unable to open `/dev/sdb1'

* 'sudo eject /dev/sdb1' or 'sudo eject /dev/sdc1' unmounts both partitions; the phone displays that it is now safe to unplug. I will call that operation "eject".

* Adding myself to group disk makes the eject program really eject (but is of course dangerous, as it gives the user write access to the HD). Doing 'sudo chmod o+r /dev/sdb1' has the same effect on eject, but of course does not persist plugging the phone again.

* After the unmount, the partitions can be mounted from the Computer window. After the eject, the partitions still display in the Computer window until I unplug the cable, but cannot be mounted again.

I guess the situation can be summarized as follows:

USB storage supports an operation, let's call it "eject", which implies unmounting all its partitions but is more than that. The default Ubuntu Hardy provides no GUI to ejection, and no CLI which does not involve sudo. The 'eject' program is able to eject, as long as the calling user has permissions to the corresponding /dev/sd* (read access is enough), which he does not by default.

I think access to USB ejection is valuable: even if it does not increase safety (I am not sure about this), it is convenient to unmount all partitions of a given device at once. Perhaps the permissions or uid:gid of /dev entries of removable media should be different?