Comment 16 for bug 972311

Asking again: is anyone from Ubuntu looking at this issue at all?

Unfortunately there's rather a complex interplay of subsystems here: It seems the top end is Nautilus, and the bottom end might be libmtp. In the middle GVFS, GIO, FUSE and all sorts of stuff might lurk.

If only some expert that knew how bits and pieces of a Linux distribution were monitoring this thread!

Anyway, on the libmtp site, there's this nice email exchange:
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=CAKnu2Mrp4s6hTXr%3DNp1VYN9sFmWbb6NV2GeTawSm2rsSu002GA%40mail.gmail.com&forum_name=libmtp-discuss

It seems that the original MTP spec transferred everything in one go. The uncached extension apparently allows devices to transfer portions of the tree, if I'm reading the exchange correctly. There's also a link in there to a different project called go-mtpfs (https://github.com/hanwen/go-mtpfs). I haven't tried it yet, but it might hold promise.

Reading the last portion of the README is really enlightening. http://libmtp.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=libmtp/libmtp;a=blob;f=README;hb=HEAD MTP was really not designed to work like a file system. I presume the confusion sets in because the UI conflates the object handling metaphor with the file handling metaphor under Windows.