first drop

Hmm, haven’t posted for a little while.

Last night I dropped all of the packet code in AROS SVN. That includes packet.handler, fat.handler and the various core changes needed to make it all work. A few people had been asking to test, and I want some feedback, so it seemed like the right time. I’ve already had a few questions and feedback which I’m working through, but generally the vibe is good :)

I heard back from Marek about getting updated FATFileSystem code. He sent me a patch with some bugfixes for the version I have, but unfortunately for us isn’t able to give us more recent versions (ie write support) as he now has a commercial arrangement for his code. It did give me a little closure though - I now know the direction to take, and aren’t waiting anymore. I hadn’t realised that it was such a burden, but it was - Saturday was a much happier day because things weren’t up in the air anymore.

I started trying to port another filesystem (SFS), and found its still pretty painful, because most handlers want to directly manipulate BCPL strings that they expect to recieve. So, to make it easier I’ve made packet.handler convert C strings to BCPL strings before passing them on to the packet handler, regardless of whether the AROS core is actually using them. Its introduces a small overhead but is probably worth it to make things easier to port.

Here’s my TODO list for packets. It may be extended later, as I find things, but this will do for now:

• Implement remaining IOFS->packet conversions
• Fully test write/modify commands. This will require a filesystem that supports them, so I’ll need to port another handler, probably SFS. This will also be useful as a “second implementation” to confirm that packet.handler is suitably generic.
• Write a porting guide
• Investigate/implement partition auto-detection
• Complete and cleanup packet->IOFS conversion in dos.library *Pkt() functions

The hard stuff is out of the way, its mostly mopping up now.