Bug#544148: gvfs* automatic processes: this time with real breakage

[Baptiste Carvello]

severity 544148 normal
kthxbye

Version: 1.6.4-3

Package: gvfs or gvfs-backends

Upon upgrading to squeeze, I got bitten by this bug: I am used to downloading my 
photos using gphoto2 on the command line. This is a perfectly legitimate and in 
my case optimal workflow. I won't change it: I own the computer, not the other 
way around.

The automatic starting of gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor breaks my workflow: I need 
to manually unmount the camera before I can do anything (the fact that I was 
also bitten by bug #546398 makes it even worse).

So this is a real bug, not just a wishlist. I would even have made it important, 
because wantonly breaking minority use cases is not the linux way.

Thankfully, there is a workaround, thanks to Michael Biebl for proposing it in 
bug #544483:

 > As dbus follows the xdg spec, you might wanna try to copy the service file to
 > /usr/local/share/dbus-1/system-services/ and set
 > Exec=/bin/false

 > This is an ugly hack though, so beware.

This solves the problem for me, and should be useful to the other reporters. 
Note that you can *not* put the dummy service file in 
$HOME/.local/share/dbus-1/system-services/ to disable the process per-user, as 
that is only searched *after* the system dirs.

To solve this bug, at the very least, the workaround should be documented in 
README.Debian. A cleaner solution would be to allow disabling some of the gvfs 
backends through a gconf key for example.

Cheers,
Baptiste