On Wed, Mar 31, 1999 at 01:20:46PM +0200, Jochem Huhmann wrote:
> On Wed, 31 Mar 1999 16:19:16 +1000 Anthony Towns wrote:
> > So whose problem *are* we trying to solve?
> The problems of game programmers, who would like to have one single spot
> to load their data files from the game`s CD? Of course there are a lot
> applications that would benefit from a default place where to look for a
> mounted floppy or CD or DVD.
In the case of a game, is a mount point enough?
I was under the impression most games included music tracks on their CDs
as well as just data, so they could just tell the CD to play the music,
rather than having to do it themselves. In which case they'd need the
raw device, as well. /dev/cdrom as a symlink to the right device seems
perfectly sensible here.
And personally, if a game is going to handle mounting the CD itself,
I'd have thought it would make more sense to have it mount it somewhere
like /var/lib/wolf3d/data, or similar, from a file-system layout point
of view. In particular this makes more sense for multi-user systems,
where two users are running two games at the same time (from /dev/scd0
and /dev/scd1 say), or a whole bunch of users are looking through CD
dictionaries, encyclopaedias and catalogues. It also makes it a bit
easier for the game to cope with having its data copied to a fixed disk --
all it needs to do is not worry about mounting the directory in future.
A downside of this, though, is that there's no easy way of doing it
unless you're root, which probably isn't a good thing for a game. At
least with one specific directory, we can declare that that must be
in /etc/fstab with the "user" flag set, so the game can just call
"mount" to get to its data. This still seems a little crude, though.
Cheers,
aj
[0] Or any other program with large amounts of static data to play with,
presumably.
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. PGP encrypted mail preferred.
``Like the ski resort of girls looking for husbands and husbands looking
for girls, the situation is not as symmetrical as it might seem.''
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