"Not least because YOU NEED THE FILE MANAGER OPEN in order to find it. From the users perspective, the file manager is not always open, and hence system level settings should be kept well away from it."
Not to detract from your plight, but this part is false. The file manager is always open from the perspective of users ("it's the thing that draws the desktop icons", people often confuse this with just "GNOME being open" though), and you can access that dialog from outside of Nautilus, via the "File Management" properties applet (nautilus-file-management-properties).
Not that I don't agree with you that it could or should live elsewhere (even though Nautilus does the mounting now). There's an open bug to rename that applet to fit its new behavior, but that's even more silly... I don't believe there is any technical reason it has to live inside of Nautilus, we're just setting handlers for the x-content/* mime-types.
A possible rationalization would be that the current "Removable Media" dialog has the distinct feel of old, especially mentioning palm pilots and forcing users to enter the exact command rather than choosing a viable app from a list. Doing this would currently require moving another dialog, the application chooser, out of Nautilus and into the platform, e.g. into Gtk+ (which is something we want to do anyways so Firefox and the like can use it). Any change made at this point, especially one as drastic as the above, would have to be done for GNOME 2.24 so it's yet-another-workflow-disruption even if it is just restoring it to the "old" location.
Anyways, the above is just a thought. I'm not responsible for the design or implementation of it (though I guess I could be if this is something we really want to distro-patch in; it's a pretty big delta so it should be thought out carefully, and we should probably get rid of those awful combo boxes and fix bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=522364 while we're at it). For now, the interested people should contact/cc the author David Zeuthen, to see his opinion on it.
"Not least because YOU NEED THE FILE MANAGER OPEN in order to find it. From the users perspective, the file manager is not always open, and hence system level settings should be kept well away from it."
Not to detract from your plight, but this part is false. The file manager is always open from the perspective of users ("it's the thing that draws the desktop icons", people often confuse this with just "GNOME being open" though), and you can access that dialog from outside of Nautilus, via the "File Management" properties applet (nautilus- file-management -properties) .
Not that I don't agree with you that it could or should live elsewhere (even though Nautilus does the mounting now). There's an open bug to rename that applet to fit its new behavior, but that's even more silly... I don't believe there is any technical reason it has to live inside of Nautilus, we're just setting handlers for the x-content/* mime-types.
A possible rationalization would be that the current "Removable Media" dialog has the distinct feel of old, especially mentioning palm pilots and forcing users to enter the exact command rather than choosing a viable app from a list. Doing this would currently require moving another dialog, the application chooser, out of Nautilus and into the platform, e.g. into Gtk+ (which is something we want to do anyways so Firefox and the like can use it). Any change made at this point, especially one as drastic as the above, would have to be done for GNOME 2.24 so it's yet-another- workflow- disruption even if it is just restoring it to the "old" location.
Anyways, the above is just a thought. I'm not responsible for the design or implementation of it (though I guess I could be if this is something we really want to distro-patch in; it's a pretty big delta so it should be thought out carefully, and we should probably get rid of those awful combo boxes and fix bug http:// bugzilla. gnome.org/ show_bug. cgi?id= 522364 while we're at it). For now, the interested people should contact/cc the author David Zeuthen, to see his opinion on it.