Comment 9 for bug 85291

@loke: surely everyone cares about a healthy file system, but the problem is thorny. I see several blueprints to handle "ordinary" filesystem fsck -- such as moving the fsck to shutdown, disabling fsck on battery power, asking user if they want to schedule it, etc. None of the ones I found seems to include a use case involving external drives.

@Andres Mujica: I just looked at the status of the PartitionManagement spec and blueprint, and it has been marked as "superseded." Its use cases also didn't include fsck on an external drive, so I think another blueprint and spec needs to be created to handle this use case.

I just did a few searches on blueprints, and there was a lot of work (in the Gutsy era) on handling a full filesystem situation, though from my reading this apparently involved a full root filesystem. It was also focused on making the system usable enough to recover from the full filesystem situation on boot -- not a full filesystem being mounted on an already active system.

What does modern Gnome do or say when you fill an external USB drive? Does it put up a warning bubble? I believe it doesn't but I haven't tried yet in Karmic. A process that watches for a full filesystem might also watch for other important notices regarding filesystems. I think someone proposed some dbus messages getting created to handle filesystem fsck situations, and that would definitely be a place to look at.

I have an old PowerBook running Ubuntu 6.06.1 Dapper PowerPC running XFCE and it pops up a warning whenever I mount a filesystem having less than 10% free space. I haven't tried a damaged system that needs a fsck. BUT I believe the full warning is an option in the file manager, or maybe I activated a daemon for that. I don't remember -- I installed that system a long time ago. ;-)