it gets late early these days

Got back to work today after a few days off. No bus trip means limited dedicated coding time so I’ve mostly been writing email for the last week. Its nice to write some code again :)

Also got some movement on the subjects of those emails. On aros-dev I’ve been trying to get some consensus on the whole packet API issue and what to do with the IOFS system. Opinions ranged from doing nothing to removing it, but noone had really been willing to step up and throw their support one way or the other. I had a good chat with Fabio Alemagna in #aros last night, and we finally managed to establish some direction. Basically, we’re in agreement that the DOS API needs to returned proper FileLock structures where necessary (ie according to the AmigaOS autodocs), and the IOFS layer does nothing for us. We ran to time and so didn’t quite reach a set of actions or anything like that, but I’m feeling much better about making significant changes to DOS and whatever else should I want to.

Meanwhile, over on teamaros I’ve been trying to get the bounty description clarified, as per my last post. Damocles came to the rescue, posting a simple “I think Rob is done, lets test and then hand over the cash” which I really appreciated. All going well I should get paid next week sometime :)

The pot has gone up in the last few days too: its now at US$440. I was a little bemused by the fact that people would continue to throw money at something that was already in progress, but my wife pointed out that its very much a cultural thing: Australians will generally take as much as they can for as little as they can get away with, whereas in many other places in the world the value of something is often considered independently of other factors like accessibility. Personally, I’m just humbled by the incredible support I’ve received while working on this project: bounty donations, blog comments, emails, and so forth. I really do appreciate the support guys, and find it very motivating. Thank you!

Of course I’m not leaving things here. Packets or not, we still need working filesystems. I’m currently reading the FAT spec and will shortly be working on implementing write support. I’m actually quite pleased that such detailed specs are available - Microsoft have a bad rap in this area, but this doc certainly doesn’t lack for anything.

Following that, I’ll be looking into other filesystems, and possibly revisiting my FUSE work. And since the EFIKA bounty has now been assigned, I find myself with less distractions and newly refocused on getting decent filesystem support in AROS. I hope it lasts :)