Re: [linuxdc-dev] VMU filesystem question

[Adrian M. <ad...@mc...>]

On Monday 09 Dec 2002 8:41 pm, David Willmore wrote:
> > David, as I understand it your basic question is "why bother?" Well my
> > answer is "why not?" coupled with "because you can". Sure developing a
> > Linux system on a Dreamcast is just a game, a way of wasting time. But
> > aren't lots of hacker projects just the same?
>
> Wow, I don't know if that could be more out of context. :)
>
> The meaning of my comment was what's the motivation for making a file
> system driver that will always be broken?  We should either make it
> complete or spend the time developing some userspace tools that do a
> better job of it--like Mr. Brown first suggested.
>
> I'm all for seemingly pointless hacking projects.  I've got a stack
> of WebPals here that I've just got running Linux and I'm trying to
> install debian on them--I've never installed it on anything before
> and maybe starting on a strange box was not a good idea... :)
>

What is a "webpal"?

> Since you're the author of the fs in question and since I've got you. :)
> Could you say just what it is you want the vmufs to do?  The two ways
> I could see it looking and being useful are:
> 1: full blown filesystem with metadata exposed as files (copyable, tarable,
> editable, etc.)
> 2: just able to 'stash' a file on it and get it back--don't need to look
> at or edit the DC files.  Also, keep the DC from choking on the files
> we produce.
>

The rea aim, such as there was one, was to allow game players to swap files 
easily, I suppose. But it's a toy, so there are other things - eg I thought 
of hosting apache off one!

> There is always #3 which is to stop all of this and just develop a nice
> suite of userspace tools like mtools (for MSDOS filesystems).  But, I
> assumed that we had already passed that fork in the road by talking
> about a FS to start with. :)
>
Well I have a working fs now - albeit it (mainly, it also deletes) being a 
read-only one. As for the options I am not sure what to do now...I need to 
give it some more thought and decide whether to continue pusuing the rw 
option for the fs or just stop where we are now...