From: Bluechip <csbluechip_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 05 Dec 2005 05:16:27 +0000

At 05:00 05/12/2005, you wrote:
>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.

LFN is far more ugly than that, a real botch-on-a-botch.
Each 11 characters of e filename has a _entire_ hidden directory entry!

>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.

The ultimate soution would be a "plugin" for each OS which created a
filename.rockboxLinkFormat ...but the maintenance involved in such a thing
could be forboding.

>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.

Of course, Rockbox could support symlink/LNK/MacThing and then it wouldn't
matter what computer you used to set your collection up.


>I'd love to hear other thoughts and opinions?
>
>-id
Received on 2005-12-05