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FedoraQt / MediaWriter

Fedora Media Writer - Write Fedora Images to Portable Media
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Ignore classes of USB Devices #290

Open jmrothst opened 3 years ago

jmrothst commented 3 years ago

Pease add a feature to block classes of USB devices. Upon insert of Garmin GPS devices (including those they OEM for other vendors) a message asks to reset the device to factory settings. Doing this to Garmin GPS devices is very likely to brick them.

Most of the Garmin devices show up with a label (in Windows OS) of "Garmin .*$", but a few show under their OEM names for BMW, Harley-Davidson, etc... Most Garmin devices show up as a USB Mass Storage FAT file system (newer ones may show up as MTP or PTP devices) with the file of "/Garmin/GarminDevice.xml" present to identify them.

dreua commented 3 years ago

I don't think this is MediaWriters fault.

jmrothst commented 3 years ago

This is not a technical issue. This is a usability issue.

The issue is that the default behavior of Fedora Media Writer suggests that these USB devices are currently broken and is offering to fix them. If the user takes the suggestion of Fedora Media Writer, it will very likely brick them. This is an example of UX concept of nudging behavior, and in this case the default will cause harm to the user, in this case to the tune of $100 to $1000 USD of immediate and direct harm.

The benefit to the user of this software by changing the behavior of Fedora Media Writer is immediate in that it will prevent destruction of their device.

dreua commented 3 years ago

Alright, thanks for the clarification, I agree with the UX issue! Maybe your proposed solution with ignoring classes is not the only solution to this problem, so wording the UX issue as such might be valuable as it allows the developers to think of different, maybe better, solutions. I'm not a developer here and I'm not sure how FMW decides whether it displays the "reset to factory settings" option.

Edit: I hope your devices are fine! Maybe there should be a backup or the vendor should consider a different design for such expensive devices. I can think of other software doing similar things to devices that present themselves as USB-drive. You usually expect to destroy data when writing to those but not brick whole devices.

grulja commented 3 years ago

This will probably need more work and consideration. In Linux I can see that every image I write to an USB disk makes the drive labeled with the name of the ISO so maybe we can use that and just allow to restore drives matching "Fedora-*" pattern or something like that.

jmrothst commented 3 years ago

Would it be possible to exclude based on USB Vendor ID?

Per http://www.linux-usb.org/usb.ids and confirmed by looking at a few Garmin devices, the Vendor ID is "091E"