From: RaeNye <raenye_at_netvision.net.il>
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 00:32:35 +0200

Your message triggered me to suggest adding scripting capabilities to RB.

Several scriptable elements currently exist (WPS, .cfg files -- including
themes) but a more powerful language will enable RB to do much more,
including:
- scheduled tasks (much more than "sleep after 10 idle minutes")
- configurable menus and button assignment. This needs some basic redesign,
but once we move to generic events (i.e., MENU_BACK instead of #ifdef ....
BUTTON_XXX) it's rather simple
- much richer WPS options (no more "you need these 7 specialized patches to
run this WPS")

I suggest lua (www.lua.org, OS and free for all uses, last version: 5.02)
which combines powerful structure (OOP, functional programming, etc.) with a
low memory footprint (on x86: 100K/lua core, 100K/std. library - less than
most codecs).

From lua's manual:
==
Lua is an extension programming language designed to support general
procedural programming with data description facilities. It also offers good
support for object-oriented programming, functional programming, and
data-driven programming. Lua is intended to be used as a powerful,
light-weight configuration language for any program that needs one. Lua is
implemented as a library, written in clean C (that is, in the common subset
of ANSI C and C++).

Being an extension language, Lua has no notion of a "main" program: it only
works embedded in a host client, called the embedding program or simply the
host. This host program can invoke functions to execute a piece of Lua code,
can write and read Lua variables, and can register C functions to be called
by Lua code. Through the use of C functions, Lua can be augmented to cope
with a wide range of different domains, thus creating customized programming
languages sharing a syntactical framework.

The Lua distribution includes a stand-alone embedding program, lua, that
uses the Lua library to offer a complete Lua interpreter.

Lua is free software, and is provided as usual with no guarantees, as stated
in its copyright notice.
==

To compile this we mostly need some dynamic memory allocation scheme
(realloc() -compatible) and exporting more of the RB core functions (a-la
plugin API) and we're set.

Any ideas before I start coding a proof-of-concept?
(I *will* ignore comments mentioning the feature freeze or version 3.0)

R.

P.S.
For those who can't handle rockalua, try white russian ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: rockbox-dev-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se
[mailto:rockbox-dev-bounces_at_cool.haxx.se] On Behalf Of Alex Mandel
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2006 7:11 PM
To: rockbox-dev_at_cool.haxx.se
Subject: Cron job on Rockbox & FLAC recording

Sorry, I'm new to Rockbox and not even sure what the base code originates
from, but I was curious about the feasibility of 2 things.

1. Cron - Time based events, assuming you leave the device on all the time
hooked up to a power source can you set it to record at specified intervals
for a certain amount of time. Something like a cron triggered script.

2. FLAC Recording - I'm assuming this is a constraint of the chipsets but
is it possible that any of the devices will have the ability to record to
FLAC.


I'm just looking for a conceptual idea of how either of these things might
be possible.

Thanks,
Alex
Received on 2006-06-21