Dopus5 Format command

A user (tekmage) reported disk corruption when the "make bootable" option was left selected when formatting a disk and suggested disabling that option as a solution. That's possible but after examining the code I think it would be safer for all OS4 users to have the Dopus5 format command open the OS4 Format command instead of the old internal one. Are there any objections to either of those options?? Disk corruption is a serious issue that needs to be fixed.

No problem here, I always use the system command anyway.

Would it be easy to add a Format entry to settings/scripts and have that default to sys:system/format for the PPC configuration?

@Severin
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I think that's possible but a user can always change the script settings. My concern is safety and I want to eliminate the possibility of overwriting an OS4 disk bootblock with an OS2 bootblock.

I don't think switching the Dopus5 Format command to use the system Format command will be a problem for users that have installed Dopus5 as a Workbench replacement. The system Format windows will open on the Dopus screen. However, people using Dopus5 as a file manager on it's own screen will inconvenienced by having the Format window pop up on the Workbench screen. I can force the initial Format windows to open on a Dopus5 screen but the final "Are you sure" requester is out of my control and will still pop up on the Workbench screen. I think it's worth the inconvenience to be sure your disks don't get trashed by old formatting.

I'm planning on adding a feature request at the Hyperion forums to have a "PUBSCREEN" option added to the Format command so it can be used by file manages running on a seperate screen. I don't know when or if that might be done but it wouldn't hurt for anyone with influence to lobby the OS4 devs for such a change.

I will let you know here when I've committed the changes and they are available in the overnight compile. I want to do some more testing first.

@xenic

Thanks for picking that up! I'll switch to that build when it's available to test as well.

Cheers,
Bill "tekmage" Borsari

@xenic

I've added an enhancement request for the pubscreen option to the OS4 bugzilla.

@tekmage
I've moved on to other projects and just check the Dopus5 bugzilla once in a while to see if something serious has gone wrong so I can attempt to fix it.

@Severin
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You must have broken SourceForge when added that . I wasn't able to access the bugzilla to see what you are referring to. I'll look at it when I get a chance.

@xenic

Any chance of looking at the filter buffers? eg. doing womething like:

set show *.(jp*g|png|gif|tif|bmp|iff)

produces an error requester saying the buffer is too small.

Icon positioning on the desktop doesn't work with big screen sizes either. it puts icons down to around 700 pixels then thinks it's run out of room and sticks them in the top left. but I've lived with this one for a long time so can wait, filters would be good though.

@xenic

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OS4 bugzilla not dopus5 sourceforge bugzilla.

@Severin
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That appears to be a bug in the original Dopu5. The autodocs state that the parsed pattern buffer should be twice as large as the input pattern. The original OS3 version could have had a buffer overflow and caused problems. Probably very few people used patterns as long as yours.

The structure where the buffer size is defined is used in a number of places so it may take a day or 2 to make the changes.

@xenic

With the pattern mentioned above I get this error:



my archives filter is worse as it needs 62. I remember using very similar filters with OS3.x but there were less formats back then.

It looks like it's just using 40 as a fixed variable instead of calculating string length * 2 + 2. Shorter filters upto 19 characters work but if you want to filter anything except a couple of file extensions you're stuffed

It doesn't help that the file select function of dopus5 isn't as good as dopus4 as it lacks filenote and filesize options (but that's another whinge for a much later date).

Be great if you can fix this filter problem, it's a bug I reported to kas1e soon after the first usable version was out for OS4. I can't remember if I put it on the sourceforge bz, probably not as I had nothing at the time that would work with the site. I know it's somewhere in the old huge thread though.

Being able to filter downloads: will be a great help as odyssey dumps everything in one drawer unlike IBrowse.

@Severin
I committed the OS4 Format changes which should be available in the next overnight compile. Please test the new OS4 format module. The Format changes only apply to OS4. The original Dopus5 format module should still work fine on a classic Amiga and I can't compile or test AROS & MOS versions.

The filter buffer problem turns out to be a much more difficult problem than I anticipated. The buffer sizes are hard-coded in a Dopus5 structure that is saved in the Environment config file. When I change the buffer sizes, Dopus5 doesn't load the config file correctly and I end up with a bizarre DOpus5 screen that doesn't work. The config file appears to be saved as a custom IFF file that I can't edit manually. Since I don't want Dopus5 users all over the world freaking out when their current config file or the default config file won't work, I'm not committing the filter buffer fixes until I can find a way around the config file issue. That might take quite a while, Sorry.

@xenic

Ok, I update tomorrow and test the format fix.

At least you're looking into the problem even if it does take a while, weird that that it's in the environment file with no way to change it though.

Maybe just ignore what is in the environment file and override it with something like 128 after it's loaded but then it's probably not as simple as a variable that needs changing.

@Severin
You'll need to wait a day or two to get the new compile. I broke the compiles for all the non-OS4 platforms. Working in a repository designed to compile for other platforms sucks when you don't have the other platforms to test with. The OS4 compile failed on the Utility Strlen command, so I'm guessing that kas1e's OS4 includes aren't exactly the same as mine. I'll commit some changes and tommorrow we'll see if they worked.

@Severin
I didn't hear back from you concerning the Format command change so I'm assuming it's O.K.

I am working on your file pattern issue but it's taking a long time because I need to add functions to convert the current environment prefs files to a new format that can contain the corrected "parse pattern". I only want change the config files once so I'm also going to expand the space for font names to 60 characters from the current 40 chars (31 for button banks) while I'm at it. I just thought I'd let you know it's being worked on (albeit slowly).

@xenic

Sorry, been a bit busy and ill recently. I updated on the 22nd and format is working as expected, system version pops up nicely.

Nice to hear it's being worked on even if slowly. I didn;t realise the set command was so embedded in the whole environment.

@Severin
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The problem is that all of the configuration items are contained in one huge C structure that is saved directly from memory to an IFF file using iffparse.library. The configuration gets loaded from the IFF file into memory that is assigned to the huge C structure where individual items can be accessed. You can't load or save individual config items. It may have originally seemed like a good idea because the code needed to do it that way is small and fast. However, the format of the configuration is locked in to the format of the C structure, which is why Dopus5 is full of code for converting 12 generations of config changes. If they had taken the time to write code to save the config items individually into a text file or XML file, it would have been easier and worked better in the long run.

A word of warning to all Dopus5 users: When I finish this update it and commit it, you won't be able to use any config files that are saved from the new overnight compile version in any previous versions of Dopus5. However, backups for the affected config files will be saved in the Dopus5 directories.