Bug#858760: nautilus: "Format..." function gives no feedback while creating filesystem, no way to know if it is finished

[Mark Fletcher]

Package: nautilus
Version: 3.14.1-2
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

I wanted to encrypt a new USB flash drive. I plugged in the drive and chose
"Open in Files". Next in Files I right-clicked on the mounted device and chose
"Format...". The dialog opened correctly and allowed me to select Encypted with
LUKS and ext4 which is what I wanted, supply a label and a passphrase, all
correctly. There followed the usual confirmations that I was about to format
the right partition. After the final confirmation... not a lot visible happens.
The volume in the left pane briefly appears as "Encypted Volume", then that
disappears. To all intents and purposes it looks as if the device has been
unmounted and nothing further is going to happen. EVENTUALLY, if left alone
long enough, a new item will appear in the left pane showing the encrytped
device with the label you asked for. But until that happens, there is no
feedback on the screen that anything is happening and the user could easily be
forgiven for thinking that nothing is.

I did this operation twice with 2 identical USB flash drives. On doing the
first one, I got to the stage where the item on the left pane disappeared,
incorrectly thought the process was complete, and removed the device,
corrupting the drive. After this I could no longer mount the drive with Files
and had to drop to the command line to correct the problem. On a hunch, when I
did the second one, I left it alone when the item disappeared from the left
hand pane, and as above EVENTUALLY a new item was created with the label I had
chosen in the "Format..." dialog. I was able to eject this device and safely
remove the second drive without corrupting it.

Can we get some kind of feedback on the screen, progress monitor, or something
to show that the process is still going while the file system is being created?
Or at the very least, a note in the dialog at the final confirmation stage
saying that the item will appear in the left pane with the chosen label when
the process is complete?



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.7
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/8 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_GB.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages nautilus depends on:
ii  desktop-file-utils         0.22-1
ii  gsettings-desktop-schemas  3.14.1-1
ii  gvfs                       1.22.2-1
ii  libatk1.0-0                2.14.0-1
ii  libc6                      2.19-18+deb8u7
ii  libcairo-gobject2          1.14.0-2.1+deb8u2
ii  libcairo2                  1.14.0-2.1+deb8u2
ii  libexempi3                 2.2.1-2
ii  libexif12                  0.6.21-2
ii  libgail-3-0                3.14.5-1+deb8u1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0         2.31.1-2+deb8u5
ii  libglib2.0-0               2.42.1-1+b1
ii  libglib2.0-data            2.42.1-1
ii  libgnome-desktop-3-10      3.14.1-1
ii  libgtk-3-0                 3.14.5-1+deb8u1
ii  libnautilus-extension1a    3.14.1-2
ii  libnotify4                 0.7.6-2
ii  libpango-1.0-0             1.36.8-3
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0        1.36.8-3
ii  libselinux1                2.3-2
ii  libtracker-sparql-1.0-0    1.2.4-2
ii  libx11-6                   2:1.6.2-3
ii  libxml2                    2.9.1+dfsg1-5+deb8u4
ii  nautilus-data              3.14.1-2
ii  shared-mime-info           1.3-1

Versions of packages nautilus recommends:
ii  eject                      2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-13.1
ii  gnome-icon-theme-symbolic  3.12.0-1
ii  gnome-sushi                3.12.0-2+b1
ii  gvfs-backends              1.22.2-1
ii  librsvg2-common            2.40.5-1+deb8u2

Versions of packages nautilus suggests:
ii  brasero              3.11.4-1.1
ii  eog                  3.14.1-1
ii  evince [pdf-viewer]  3.14.1-2+deb8u1
ii  totem                3.14.0-2
ii  tracker              1.2.4-2
ii  xdg-user-dirs        0.15-2

-- no debconf information