[Sugar-devel] Accessing external media from within an activity (was: Re: Problem listing journal objects)

[Jim Simmons]

Tomeu,

What you're saying seems to contradict what others have told me.  I
have three places I run Sugar:

1).  My XO, running .82.   Files on removable media are listed using
the datastore API as if they were Journal entries.

2).  A linux box running Fedora 10, using the Sugar environment that
ships with it which is a buggier version of what I have on my XO and
does pretty much the same thing.  I had to remove sorting in my
datastore query because this was broken in Fedora 10.

3).  Another Linux box running Fedora 11, with the .84 Sugar
environment that ships with it.  With this one the datastore API I was
using does not list files on thumb drives.  The files are visible in
the Journal activity and probably in the ObjectChooser, but cannot be
retrieved using the datastore API.  Several people were of the opinion
that the datastore API in .84 only deals with the Journal proper and I
would have to use POSIX commands to list out files on thumb drives.
That is what I am planning to do.

I haven't tried this on SoaS lately, so I don't know how this might
work on the latest .84.

James Simmons


On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:30 AM, Tomeu Vizoso<tomeu at sugarlabs.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 17:09, Jim Simmons<nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Eben,
>>
>> I have given some thought to how I would implement getting image files
>> from removable media and I think I have a workable plan.  Before I
>> describe it I'd like to confess that it is *not* true that .84 code
>> will show objects on the root directory of a thumb drive.  It won't
>> show *anything* on a thumb drive, as some of you have pointed out.
>> .82 shows every file whether it is on a thumb drive or in the Journal.
>>  It is shown as a flat list with no way to tell what came from where.
>
> 0.84 should display all files in the thumb drive in the same flat
> view, if it doesn't is because there's a bug somewhere.
>
>> What I think I might do is emulate this behavior in .84.  Python has
>> an os.walk() function that will list out all the files within a
>> subdirectory.  I was thinking that after I load the table with Journal
>> objects I could do the os.walk() for the directory /media, which is
>> where all the removable media seems to get mounted.  In my table model
>> I would store the filename and a wrapper class for a Journal object.
>> If there is an actual Journal object in there it would call the object
>> to get a path to the image file in the Journal.  If not, it would
>> simply get a real path to a file on a removable device.
>
> This is very close to what should be happening in 0.84.
>
>> I would not check for mounts, etc.  Instead, my Activity has a Refresh
>> button which reloads everything.  The user would know when he needs to
>> use it.
>>
>> I might put some sort of icon in the table rows so the user knows
>> which entries are from the Journal and which are from thumb drives,
>> etc.
>>
>> I suppose the ObjectChooser should be improved as much as possible,
>> but I doubt I'll ever use it myself.  If you want to load only one
>> file into an Activity you could just as easily restore the file from
>> the Journal.  If you need to load more than one file having a modal
>> dialog pop up each time just slows you down.
>
> Agreed, multiple selections would help there I guess.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tomeu
>
>> James Simmons