The script required the destination to be its own mount point, while the
documentation and its own usage text both told the user to pass
/media/IPOD/Music. The documented invocation was rejected.
A subdirectory is the better target, so the guard was what was wrong. --delete
is confined to it, and the device path budget is now derived from it -- the
part of the destination below its mount point -- rather than configured, so the
budget cannot disagree with where the files are actually going. The check that
matters is that the destination sits on a FAT filesystem, which is also what
catches an unmounted device: /media/IPOD/Music then resolves to the host's own
root filesystem, and emptying that is the outcome all of these guards exist to
prevent.
Three further faults found while testing the guards rather than reasoning about
them:
Stripping the trailing slash from "/" left an empty string, so the guard
refusing the host root never fired and the user got "destination is not a
directory" instead.
die() printed only its first argument, so the second half of the non-FAT
message -- the half saying to check whether the device is mounted -- was
silently dropped.
--help was not handled at all. Only -h reached the usage text, and it exited 2
to stderr, which is right for misuse and wrong for someone asking a question.
Help now goes to stdout and exits zero.
The usage text carries the guidance rather than only the README, since the
question it answers is asked at the terminal.
tools/sync-to-ipod.sh does the whole transfer to a Rockbox device, so the only
manual part left is the disk-mode button sequence.
The guards are the substance rather than decoration. rsync --delete is being
aimed at a whole filesystem, so the destination must exist, be its own mount
point, and be a FAT filesystem; the mirror must be non-empty and must not be
the destination. Emptying the wrong directory is not a mistake that announces
itself.
It also excludes /.rockbox, the scrobbler logs and the usual filesystem
metadata directories. The mirror does not contain them, so a sync to the card
root would otherwise have deleted the Rockbox installation -- which the first
draft of this script would have done.
The unmount is why this is a script at all. FAT32 has no journal, the device is
reached through the Apple firmware's disk mode because Rockbox's own mass
storage is unreliable on an iFlash, and an interrupted write is corruption that
needs fsck.vfat from another machine.
tools/submit_scrobbles.py sends the Rockbox scrobbler log to Last.fm and sets
it aside. Rockbox writes it in AUDIOSCROBBLER 1.1: tab-separated, one line per
track, rated L for listened or S for skipped, and only the listened ones are a
play. It runs before the copy, because the plays already happened and a failed
transfer is no reason to lose them as well.
Two things there differ from every other Last.fm call in these projects.
Scrobbling is a write method, so it needs the API secret and a session key
obtained once through the browser rather than the read-only key. And a target
with no real-time clock gets /.scrobbler-timeless.log with every timestamp set
to zero; those are counted and reported but never sent, since submitting them
would mean inventing when they happened.
Signature generation sorts parameter names by the ASCII table rather than
numerically, so artist[10] precedes artist[1]. Sorting them the obvious way
produces an invalid signature and no other symptom, so there is a test for it.
The log is renamed rather than deleted once accepted, so that if Last.fm
quietly dropped something the evidence is still on the device.
Emma Thorpe