PownceFS, round two 2008/06/04

Well, the first version of PownceFS didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. After I put it out in the world, Leonard ran with it and very nearly got everything to behave on a Mac. But even with his help I still hadn't been able to import songs my friends had uploaded to Pownce directly into iTunes.

That was March, this is June. A couple of nights ago I got PownceFS working well on Leopard. Things aren't all well quite yet but it's much closer. I can mount the filesystem by running ./powncefs.py mnt, and it'll show up in Finder just like I'd hoped but there the quirks begin. Finder is rather fickle about what system calls it actually issues, so I'm trying to figure out how to guarantee the directory entries are present. Thus far, the most foolproof way is simply running ls -lR after mounting the filesystem. (Less than fast. Assuming Finder plays nice, the iTunes import will step in and be mean to you. For some unknown reason the script dies during the iTunes import (with the copy-to-iTunes-folder bit set). I've got to instrument the code a bit to see what's really happening but that is for another day.

This blog post isn't really a release, per se, just getting something more out there for other folks to hack on. Here we go now: PownceFS on GitHub

Comments (2)

I tried to find where you were running ls-lR after mounting the filesystem and it was less than obvious. I was just wondering what extra info the -l provided that you wanted. (I might be completely missing the point of running ls-lR.)

— David Hall — 2008/06/05 3:47 am
The ls -lR was really an afterthought. It isn't listed in the README, which lists ls -l just as an example of what you could do with this program. The -l is of course not necessary, it's just pretty.

— Richard Crowley — 2008/06/05 11:11 pm