Re: [Plib-devel] LoadASE problem.

[Steve B. <sjb...@ai...>]

Dave McClurg wrote:

> Steve will design something he is comfortable with for PLIB
> but I do think something like VFS is needed functionality

Ehem?!?  Steve wasn't planning on doing anything of the sort!

I'm really not too keen on going to all the trouble of
writing a full-blown file-system-inside-a-file, it's
more work than I want to do - and I wouldn't use it because
I'm utterly unconvinced that it's needed.

What I would *consider* doing would be:

1) Write a file name mangling function that converts UNIX-style
   file names to the 'native' file name format.

2) Write wrappers for fopen/dirent to use that standard that
   give the appearance of all systems accepting either UNIX-style
   or native file name/path conventions.

That's maybe an evening's work with very little maintenance needed
after that - versus a fairly major chunk of effort.

If I *was* going to write a file-system-in-a-file, I'd use
the existing 'tar' format since all the issues of storing
everything necessary for a file system into a single byte
stream has already been solved.  It would also allow you
to create and extract files from these virtual file systems
using 'tar' and have things like file permissions and ownerships
preserved.  The sources for tar are out there - and they port
onto absolutely every platform and address things like
byte ordering between heterogeneous machine 'endianness'.

I *certainly* wouldn't attempt to invent a new 'tarball'-like
format.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
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