Rockbox

So what exactly is the purpose and use case for this plugin?

It just handles a wps which is, for lack of a better term,
lumped into one file (the .wpz) which is extracted into
a temp directory and applied, and is set as the wps in the
global settings… and the temp directory only changes when
another .wpz is chosen.
Tis used like any other viewer plugin.

I noticed the screens[] conflict as well, but due to another patch I use.. Funny enough I did the exact same thing (change screens[] to dscreens[] in doom code)

I do not see any advantages with this. There is no saving diskspace, in fact more diskspace is needed, loading of a new WPS would take longer and editing WPS would require more steps then just opening the required file.

There really isn’t right now. But it does have an advantage over
the planned .tar usage… as the tar format has a 512 byte header
which most of it is zeroed out to fit 512 bytes, and then the file
is padded to the next 512 bytes. So it has some advantage over what’s
planned in terms of space usage.

Yes, I know it takes longer to load a wps with it.

Well, more disk space is needed to load one WPS.. but having everything packaged into its own file, you eliminate the need for folders with bitmaps, so it looks much nicer in the end. Downloading one file from the WPS Gallery with everything inside and running it sounds better to me than downloading a ZIP off the WPS Gallery, discovering its structure, extracting it to the right place, and then running it.

But why is this a plugin then? If this is a solution for loading multiple images for WPS it should be a part of the core surely?

And the reason we mentioned tar was becuase it is a simple format for which “everyone” already has a tool for. If uncompressed zip is as simple, it might be a good idea as well.

Actually, a lot of Windows users don’t have (or know how to use) tar by default. I’m pretty sure WinRar can do it (it does just about every compression/archive format) but I’d bet a lot of people would be confused over how to make it work.

Then again, uncompressed Zip is similar… I believe Windows makes compressed Zipfiles from the explorer interface, and WinRar and WinZip have options for no compression. IMO, the choice should be whichever turns out to be easier for the average newb.

Still, we don’t want a simple unpack plugin for this. We want to the WPS loader to be able to get all images from a single file and use it instead of loading individual files. Be it zip or tar.

All Rockbox developers who’d create a rockbox.zip file (which then preferably automatically would produce and use these all-images-in-one-file blobs) already have both tar and zip installed.

When using zip we’d also need to care about compression – or prepare for users coming up with “rockbox doesn’t like my zip” when they just missed they need to turn off compression. Handling compression in rockbox would be more work – so I’d vote for using tar. Compared to the disk size of most players size shouldn’t matter.