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.