Re: [Bug-gnupod] mktunes: Same settings & version, different databases

[Nuno J. Silva]

address@hidden (Nuno J. Silva) writes:

> As far as I can tell, _Pretender (in Hash58.pm, the file I've been
> looking at), writes at different places: in the computer which generates
> the good db, it writes at the specified offsets, in the other, it
> appends some values to the end of the file instead of doing it at the
> given offset (but it might be doing some writes on the right place).
>
> Strange enough, I've been using the debug technique known as
> debug-by-printf and it seems the offsets are okay...
>
> I'll dive deeper into this and then I'll say what's going on (I hope I
> can find that out).

I found it out: it is seek() who is behaving differently: on one
computer (the one on which mktunes.pl works fine), it reacts as
expected, it actually seeks, while on the other after doing a syswrite,
seeking has no effect and a future syswrite writes to the end of the
file.

As the perl documentation for seek ($ perldoc -f seek) says seek
shouldn't be used with sysread/write, I changed all the calls to seek so
that sysseek is used instead.

(The docs also say sysseek doesn't mix well with other non-sys*
functions, like read and write - I checked and those are not used in
Hash58, so I suppose that's not a problem.)

Doing this fixed the issue and now the problematic computer is able to
generate an iTunesDB my iPod accepts.

The testing I made in perl shows no issues with sysseek on the computer
where seek works, but I'll try the changes I made to Hash58.pm on that
computer too, just to check if it doesn't break what was working.

I don't know if the developers want to change the code to use sysseek or
if they prefer to keep seek instead. I'm attaching the patch I wrote,
just in case someone wants to play with it.

The patch is against GNUpod 0.99.8.

diff -uNr gnupod-0.99.8.orig/src/ext/Hash58.pm gnupod-0.99.8/src/ext/Hash58.pm
--- gnupod-0.99.8.orig/src/ext/Hash58.pm        2010-10-15 21:14:04.000000000 
+0100
+++ gnupod-0.99.8/src/ext/Hash58.pm     2010-10-15 21:17:28.000000000 +0100
@@ -195,16 +195,16 @@
                my $size      = $wl->{$k}->{size};
                
                if(defined($fill_with)) {
-                       seek($fd,$k,0) or die "Unable to seek to $k : $!\n";
+                       sysseek($fd,$k,0) or die "Unable to seek to $k : $!\n";
                        my $br = sysread($fd, $wl->{$k}->{write}, $size);
                        die "Failed to read $size bytes, got only $br\n" if $br 
!= $size;
                        $writeback = chr($fill_with) x $size;
                }
-               seek($fd,$k,0) or die "Unable to seek to $k : $!\n";
+               sysseek($fd,$k,0) or die "Unable to seek to $k : $!\n";
                my $bw = syswrite($fd, $writeback, $size);
                die "Failed to write $size bytes, only wrote $bw\n" if $bw != 
$size;
        }
-       seek($fd,0,0); # Doesn't hurt :-)
+       sysseek($fd,0,0); # Doesn't hurt :-)
 }
 
 



-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg