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Subject: Symlinks in rockbox

Symlinks in rockbox

From: Dan Davison <davison_at_stats.ox.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:53:32 -0500

I'd like to propose (and unless discouraged will submit a patch
allowing) symlink-like files in rockbox. But first I'd like to ask
advice about the implementation.

These would be text files containing the path to a different directory
or file. In the case of a directory the directory browser would be
called on that directory, and in the case of a file the default select
action for the target file would occur. I've described my current
use-case below.

It was possible to get this behaviour quickly for directory symlinks
with only about 5 lines of code added, using the m3u file type. However,

1. Do you think this merits a new file type? (How feasible / attractive
is adding a new file type, e.g. .link, to rockbox?)

2. Alternatively, the m3u file type could be used, so that rockbox's
behaviour is unchanged for standard m3u files, but that rockbox is also
able to operate on a superset of m3u which permits (on the first line) a
directory to be listed rather than a music file (and perhaps also .cfg,
.fnt, .jpg, etc). (Yes this raises some questions...)

It seems to me that (1) would be preferable to (2). But maybe there are
other reasons to object to (1)?

I have two immediate uses for this:

1. I like having a flat list of artist directories to scroll
through. However there are getting to be quite a few, and this way I can
create directories named 0-9A-Z containing "symlinks" to the relevant
subset of artist directories. (I tend to use the directory browser to
access my music, rather than the tag database)

2. For each artist I create a directory containing symlinks to 50 other
directories for artists considered to be "similar" according to some
metric (e.g. I do this for last.fm similar artists and for a personal
distance metric).

Thanks for any advice/suggestions,

Dan
Received on 2009-02-17

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