Tag Archives: usability

GVFS mount points, or, how to completely ignore usability while building a usability feature.

Gnome happily mounts my phone’s MTP shares for me. I can even browse for them in “files” and drag and drop and everything. It’s pretty cool. And, magically, behind the scenes, it even exists in the filesystem so I can use rsync and cp and things.

But the mount point…. Oh boy. What on earth were they thinking. /run/user/1000/gvfs/mtp\:host\=%5Busb%3A002%2C010%5D/
Are you fucking kidding me? That’s an url encoded way of saying [usb:002,010] Why did it need to be url encoded? No idea. What about the content? Oh, that’s the USB bus, and device address. Spectacular. That means it depends on not only what physical port it’s plugged into, but what order it was plugged in. (And that unplugging and replugging will make a new path) Let’s not use things like iManufacturer, iProduct, iSerial, vid, pid, anything actually device specific no, not here.

I’m sure this was done to try and ensure that the mount point would be unique. Great. Mission accomplished. However, it could be made unique, and usable at the same time. And then this thing, that exists out of a usability feature, would actually be more usable.