From: Owen Sebastian Hofmann <oshofmann_at_amherst.edu>
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2003 20:08:49 -0400

Hi. Recently I've been playing around with the rockbox source, and I've
started working on implementing a sort of virtual directory hierarchy
within the file browser. The user can create a file which defines an
arbitrary layout of directories and files, such as this:
"root" {
        "file one" /directory/file.mp3
        "file two" /directory2/file2.mp3
        "a subdirectory" {
                "another" /foo/bar.mp3
                "another subdir" {
                        "whee" /fun.mp3
                }
        }
        "another file" /asdf/asdf.mp3
}

This file is then translated into a binary format (I decided to use a
binary format for speed and code simplicity inside of rockbox itself),
which, when browsed into with the rockbox file browser, represents that
layout as if it were an actual directory layout. I've uploaded some
files to http://www.amherst.edu/~oshofmann/rockbox/ which contain a very
alpha version of this. These are:
rockbox-2.0-vfs.diff: a patch to the 2.0 version of rockbox. Changes
are fairly self-contained, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to make
it work with cvs versions

vfsc.c: a very sloppily coded interpreter for the text format mentioned
above. Written and tested using linux, it should work fine with cygwin.
  I have no idea about windows. This is separate from the rockbox
source tree.

vfs.h: file included from both the rockbox patched sources and the
interpreter.

So far, this is very preliminary. I've only implemented browsing of the
  .vfs files and playing of directories. No queueing, resume, or checks
to make sure you don't try to record or alter any files (Altering files
could muck things up, recording will probably just record to the
directory containing the .vfs file). The text file must be in exactly
the format listed above. Quoted label, white space, unquoted file name,
line break. I'm writing to see if anybody is interested in seeing more
work on this. I think that this feature, while perhaps not
extraordinarily useful, is interesting, as it would allow completely
arbitrary structuring of files, such as by genre, mood, or anything the
user can think up.
Received on 2003-06-08