Enhancing the volumes function (was Volume Size)

[Paul Dupuis]

On 10/16/2014 10:24 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:
> The other day I wrote:
>
> > Warren Samples wrote:
> > > The dictionary does indicated, by omission of the penguin icon,
> > > that 'volumes()' is not supported under Linux.
> >
> > Seems a silly omission, so I just submitted a request for that:
> > <http://quality.runrev.com/show_bug.cgi?id=13673>
>
> That request has gotten some healthy attention from the core dev team
> at RunRev, but the nature of the request has expanded beyond the
> original goal of simply making volumes() work on Linux.
>
> It occurred to me shortly after posting it that the current return
> value, consisting of volume names only, is close to useless on all
> three platforms.
>
> On Mac, is the volume mounted at /Volumes/ or at /?
> On Linux, is it at /mnt/ or /media/<user>/, or somewhere else?
> On Windows, what drive letter is it mapped to?
>
> In short, the volume name alone is insufficient to actually do
> anything meaningful with it.  In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of
> any circumstance where it might have been useful beyond Mac Classic.
>
> The team is exploring many options, but the key to all of this boils
> down to this question:
>
> What do we want to use a volumes function for?
>
> Knowing the use cases the function should support will be very helpful
> in guiding the design decisions around this enhancement.
>
> If you have a specific use case in mind, please feel free to add it in
> the comments for that request.
>

One use of a 'the detailed volumes' syntax would be to provide
information about whether the drive is a USB memory stick or other
'removable' class of drive. There a number of people out there with
current xTalk code to detect (or attempt to detect) removable drives -
memory sticks - to offer the customer a different application
configuration if on removable media vs a classic app running from the
disk the OS is on.

A 'the detailed volumes' syntax would match the model for files and
folders and provide data like name, mount point/drive letter,  total
size (bytes) available space (bytes),  whether the dive is
internal/external, network base or local, removable or not - all of
which is data we currently use or could us.