alternate builds for common mods?

[animatorgeek]

What would be the chance of getting official builds for common mods, such as (speaking from an h120 perspective) RTC and Compact Flash versions?  Or perhaps this is something that could be handled automatically -- check the hardware for whether the mod has been made, or perhaps include it as a switch in a config file?  What's the policy on this sort of thing?

[Chronon]

I moved this to General Discussion because it is a question about general policy regarding official builds.  As such, it didn't fit in New Ports or Unsupported Builds.  I believe that the feeling is that building Rockbox is not terribly difficult and someone who wishes to modify their player should take the initiative to also modify the code that they build for the player.  Perhaps someone can provide a more authoritative answer.

[Llorean]

The official build already handles Compact Flash.

As for the RTC, it was more or less decided that it adds a lot of code so having it compiled in by default was unwanted. Generally speaking, it's considered easy enough to compile Rockbox (it really is easy, something that it doesn't look like beforehand, but once you've done it you tend to realize it wasn't as imposing as it seemed) that people can handle it, since all the code is already there just waiting to be included in the actual build you make.

It requires basically no programming knowledge at all, just changing a configuration option before you start compiling.

[animatorgeek]

Thanks for the answers. Sorry about the incorrect forum -- wasn't sure where that belonged.

My understanding is that the Compact Flash mod on the h1x0 (and probably the h3x0 as well, though I haven't researched that) is touchy, not working with many available CF cards.  Is that something that could be addressed in the base build, or is it something that modders are just going to have to live with?  I also thought CF-based players might have different optimal settings when it comes to the "hard drive".  For instance, I assume there's no need to "spin down" any more, though I'm not even sure whether that has any performance effect on the CF card.  Power conservation seems like it would be different when there are no moving parts to worry about.

[Llorean]

Basically, as far as I'm aware, the touchyness is in the bootloader since we haven't released a version of the bootloader in quite some time, so the current bootloader version doesn't have the fixes that allow the CF mod to work.

As far as spinning down the disk goes, I believe that no power-management features of a disk-based target should be harmful or even performance-hindering on the CF-modded players. We basically handle buffering and such the same on our actually flash-based players anyway.