[Development] moving some SystemInfo stuff into qtbase (was Re: QtDriveInfo module in Playground)

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2014-01-13, David Faure <david.faure at kdab.com> wrote:
> Mounting can still be done with `mount`, no?

Only in rare cases. Normally on linux from a user app you would call out
to udisks, who would connect to polkit and have polkit maybe query you
and other magic.

> Notifications mean listening to dbus signals though, indeed. Tricky.
> Maybe by using libdbus directly, but this contradicts the long term plan of 
> not using libdbus in QtDBus (AFAIK).

In order to not do it half-assed and in a way that only works for your
app run as root, you do need dbus on linux. I don't know how it is done
on windows and mac.

Though mounting/unmounting drives is in general not something I would
expect an application to do, but rather something that happens in the
workspace, be it Windows, Gnome or OSX.

For the specific case of mounting stuff from the file dialog, maybe it
should be even easier to call out to a system file dialog, like the
QFileDialog::getSomething function does. If that can be done somehow,
then I only think we have the 'dedicated system information / system
manipulation apps' left, and I'm not sure that I think that it is a
usecase that Qt should try to solve in qtbase, but rather keep it around
as an extra addon.

/Sune