On 18.02.2008 18:19, ron minnich wrote:
I dropped this idea on Stefan and he tells me I am not insane. I even did it BEFORE coffee :-)
Could a LAR contain more LAR files? i.e. could LAR be recursive.
Please don't! See the end of the mail for my reasons.
The recursive nature of LAR files could be trivially mirrored in the code.
So, we could have this: normal/payload.lar
then, the payload would BE a LAR, and to move it to another LAR, lar -x bios.bin normal/payload.lar lar -a newbios.bin payload.lar:normal/payload.lar
Why not have an option/compression specifier like "nocompress:"? We could call it "copy:" and it would copy the individual members of the old LAR to the new LAR. No code changes in lib/lar.c needed.
Information preserved. Very little code need be added, since LAR parsing is already in the rom, you just need to cover the case of supporting LAR-in-LAR. No new sub-LARs needed.
The piece of code which decides where to look for the next LAR member in lib/lar.c is the most fragile piece of code in v3. I'd rather avoid any changes to the code unless absolutely necessary, since I very well remember how much time we lost each time we hit a bug in a corner case.
Regards, Carl-Daniel