[BusyBox] off topic: 'device table support' for mkcramfs?

[Jonas Holmberg]

> First, thanks for publishing the mkcramfs patch.

It's GPL :-)

> Maybe superficially, but it seems that there is nothing that that
> metafiles offers over the much simpler device_table scheme.  One
> could easily generate a device_table by adding a script into the
> Makefile to walk the tree looking for metafiles, then delete the
> metafiles.  Or conversely, I suppose (generate metafiles from a
> device_table).

I didn't think of that. It seems like a good idea to use both 
implementations and the ability to convert between them. It was probably 
not that easy for Erik to implement device tables in mkfs.jff2 since he 
had to rewrite it and I know that it was simple to add metafiles-support 
to mkfs.jffs2 before he rewrote it. And there are probably other mkfs-
progs where it is the other way around, like the current implementation 
of mkfs.jffs2 (no offense, Erik :-). (I think it's easy to add metafile-
support to a mkfs-program if it recursively walks each directory, IIRC.) 
So depending on the design of the mkfs-prog you could choose to implement 
device_table- or metafiles-support (and then have converters to satisfy 
your particular buildsystem).

I haven't examined the device_tables in a long time. Does it do all the 
include-, ignore-, userid- and groupid-stuff yet? In that case it 
shouldn't be any problem using it for us I think (we have to write a 
converter, of course).

/Jonas