Date   : Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:16:36 +0100
From   : rick@... (Rick Murray)
Subject: Patching a CF card patched ADFS

On 02/01/2011 00:02, J.G.Harston wrote:

> where you can almost hear the wearyness in the writing and the heads
> in hands where Acorn say that developers really need to stop charging
> off in all directions gobbling up

Sometimes I think the responses to my Allocate requests were thinly 
veiled surprise. Then again, anybody who's been in the PD scene has 
probably had their share of mess sorting out half a dozen programs each 
claiming their own specific filetype.... all of which use the SAME 
filetype. <sigh>


That said, Acorn do have to shoulder some blame for allocating a wodge 
of types to files which do not actually need a specific type. I don't 
have any examples to hand, but I do recall a number of "internal" files 
(like settings, colour tables, etc) which are managed entirely by the 
respective program, having no double-click action whatsoever. For those, 
&FFD would suffice.


> filing system numbers and that things like IDE/SCSI/CDROM/etc filing
> systems should be device drivers to ADFS, not filing systems in their
> own right.

You mean like how DOSFS works? I think some parts of the filesystem code 
were notoriously complicated. And, then, some filing systems had to work 
around limitations inherent in ADFS. I can format a 2Gb partition using 
Simtec's IDEFS. I cannot format a 2Gb partition using RISC OS 3.70's 
ADFS. Likewise how well does ADFS play with multiple partitions on a 
disc, or stupidly-long filenames as you might encounter on a CD-ROM for 
a Windows platform? It's all well Acorn making proclamations, but I do 
see a fair few solutions being designed the way they were to work around 
limitations in ADFS. How come we waited until RISC OS 4 (or the 
non-existent 3.80) for the ability to handle 'big' harddiscs?


> That's why developers really should have been writing device drivers
> not filing systems.

And that's why if ADFS thinks it should have been the base (instead of 
FileCore), it should have been ahead of the game, not behind it.


Best wishes,

Rick.

-- 
Rick Murray, eeePC901 & ADSL WiFI'd into it, all ETLAs!
BBC B: DNFS, 2 x 5.25" floppies, EPROM prog, Acorn TTX
E01S FileStore, A3000/A5000/RiscPC/various PCs/blahblah...