From: ian douglas <id_at_w98.us>
Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2005 21:00:20 -0800

Neon John wrote:
> I'd kill for symbolic links too, but can they be mapped back to the
> FAT file system?

No, that was just for the die-hard Unix/Linux fans out there ;o) Only
way we'd get true symlinks is if Rockbox supported ext2/ext3 formatted
file systems. And those wouldn't show up on Windows...

> Isn't that kinda how Win98 handled long file names?

Yeah, didn't they have some funky hidden system file in every folder
that mapped "long filename.txt" to LONGFI~1.TXT or something? I'm not
sure that'd be very efficient given the RAM/CPU that Rockbox has to keep
into consideration.

I'll tinker with the LNK files, but if I can't get around the filename
situation then I'm not sure it'll be worth pursuing. Obviously, we'd
need a way to create the same symlink structure for other OS's so
Linux/Apple fans could copy files around too ... might be a hassle.

Personally, I'd be happy with a one-line text file as the shortcut,
which contained something like

ROCKBOX:../relative/path/filename.mp3

... where the ROCKBOX: portion could be recognized by the software as
"oh hey, I need to follow a different path to get to this file"

So the actual disk path would look something like:

/rock hits of the 80's/def leppard - pour some sugar on me.mp3
... which would be the original file of (~4.5MB), and
/def leppard/pour some sugar on me.mp3
... which would actually be the symlink/shortcut of ~70 bytes of
information.

I dunno, just tossing out ideas. Either way, a software utility/script
or manual creation would be needed to have those shortcut files exist,
as well as a patched version of Rockbox to open the files and scan the
first 8 bytes for "ROCKBOX:" and then take the remaining file as which
file to *really* open to push the data to the decoder.

My initial thought: the Windows .LNK structure could work but would only
serve the Windows crowd. I use Linux about 90% of the time, and I'm sure
there are other OS's represented on this list, which won't have any way
to create the .LNK files natively.

I'd love to hear other thoughts and opinions?

-id
Received on 2005-12-05