Re: [openMSX-devel] Proposal to remove roms dirs and SHA1SUMS files

[Maarten t. H. <ma...@tr...>]

On Monday 25 June 2012 11:13:08 Wouter Vermaelen wrote:

> I agree with the first part of the proposal:
>  - remove the SHA1SUMS files, and the (then) empty roms subdirectories
>    in the machines and extensions directories

As I said on IRC, I agree with this part as well.

Patrick suggested that we could even get rid of the model name 
subdirectories. He also suggested putting everything in a single XML file, 
which would not be a good idea in my opinion, but we could have one XML file 
per machine/extension.

So instead of:
  share/machines/Philips_NMS_8250/hardwareconfig.xml
we would have:
  share/machines/Philips_NMS_8250.xml

It reduces the amount of directories we have to create on install and the 
amount of scanning we have to do at startup.

> I'm not so sure about the second part of the proposal:
>  - remove the 'roms/' part from the filenames in the hardwareconfig.xml
> files
> 
> I guess people look at the hardwareconfig.xml file and see the roms
> subdirectory mentioned there together with the corresponding roms subdir
> in the machine dir. So they'll figure that's where they need to put their
> roms. Maybe if we remove this clue (so remove the roms subdir, but still
> refer to it from the hardwareconig.xml file), people will read the
> documentation? (see also below).

I think that would help: if the "roms" subdirectories disappear people will 
notice that something is different than before and start looking for the new 
way to do things.

> I also prefer to not break backwards compatibility for people who did
> go through all the trouble of manually sorting their system rom files.

As a user I really dislike upgrades that break things, especially if the 
reason for incompatibility is just a cleanup action, which is the case here.

So I would prefer to support both the old and the new location for some 
time. After, say, 5 years we can remove backwards compatibility for this. 
That way, everyone who starts from a clean install from time to time (most 
Windows and Mac users do when moving to a new machine) will be using either 
share/systemroms or the new manual location.

> I think we should extend the information in the
>     share/{machines,extensions}/README
> file. And create a similar new file
>     share/README
> And in addition to installing these README files in the openMSX
> system directory, we could, at run time, copy them to the openMSX
> user directory.

If we have READMEs at too many levels, users might read the wrong one. I 
would prefer a single README at the share/ level that explains all locations 
users can put additional data files in. An added advantage is that the same 
README is then explaining share/systemroms and per-machine ROMs, so it 
increases the chance that users will read about the preferred approach.

> Should we rename the README file so that alphabetically it doesn't
> get sorted in the middle of the (long) list of machines?

Most graphical file managers put directories before files, so a file in a 
place where only subdirectories are stands out anyway.

How does Windows react to a file named just "README"? Is there a need to 
name it "README.txt"?

Bye,
		Maarten