Resolution of instruments for MID files broken in Linux
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#19 Resolution of instruments for MID files broken in Linux
There are a number of issues regarding how .pat file paths are resolved under Linux, affecting libmodplug/src/load_pat.cpp:
- The default path to the configuration file is hardcoded and its value is /usr/local/timidity/timidity.cfg which is rarely where TiMidity is installed in most Linux distributions. The most common path is probably /etc/timidity/timidity.cfg . It's up to distributions to set their own path; however, due to not being configurable in a more prominent place, it has been missed at least in Debian.
- The .pat file names are limited to 15 characters. That's rarely the case; for example, a widely used .pat library, freepats, uses larger names for most files. See http://www.formauri.es/personal/pgimeno/pastes/freepats.cfg for a sample freepats.cfg file (the one installed in Debian).
- The 'dir' directives in the config files are ignored. See above file for an example of one such directive.
- The '.pat' extension is always appended, even if the .pat file name already specifies it in the configuration. That results in files ending in .pat.pat, which fail to load.
Since TiMidity works fine in the same environment, a partial imitation of the .pat file resolution logic in it would probably be the best way to go. Here it is for reference:
a) Every path in a 'dir' directive is appended to a list. A 'dir' directive can have multiple paths separated by spaces.
b) The .pat file name is passed to open_file verbatim. If that fails, AND the file name does not end in .pat already, then the string .pat is appended, and open_file is tried again. (It also considers files ending in .pat.gz and similar, and decompresses them, but I think that's out of the scope of libmodplug).
c) open_file works as follows:
- If the .pat name is an absolute path, then it's used as is, and reports success of failure.
- Otherwise, every path in the path list (see a) is prepended to the file name and tried in turn.
A closer look into TiMidity's .cfg parser reveals that it recognizes paths enclosed in single or double quotes ('...' or "...") as single paths regardless of whether they contain spaces. That should probably be imitated as well.