What's going on with Rockbox Utility?

[Cassandra]

My time to work on Rockbox is quite limited at the moment, I'm afraid, as I'm in the process of finding somewhere new to live, which always seems to take up all the available time there is and then some.  However, just to let you know, I'm still thinking about the installer and getting it to a state where I feel it's ready for a release.  (It's fully useable, and cross-platform for Linux and Windows, it just doesn't do the bootloader installation yet.  Since this is the trickiest part of the process, I see that as a natural pre-requisite for a 1.0 release.)

Anyway, the current state is that I've hit something of a brick wall in the process of hardware detection on Windows.  I can enumerate the USB device tree just fine, and even extract USB ID strings just fine.  The problem is that there seems to be no way to map these devices on to locations in the Windows file system.  I've scoured the web, and while there are a few complicated routines out there to enumerate USB devices by searching across the drive letters, none of these will do so in a way that allows me to link back to the physical hardware information.

Not being much of a Windows programmer, I'm at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed from here.  Any Windows programmers out there who know a good place to ask questions to get this solved?

[GodEater]

There are probably other equally capable people who can work this one out - but in *case* they don't see this thread in a timely manner - I'll pass this on to a friend of mine who is an absolute genius windows programmer. He may not be able to spare the time to contribute directly - but he may have enough to point someone in the right direction for this.

[linuxstb]

Why not just let the user find their device?

Obviously it would be better if rbutil could do it, but I wouldn't want that to hold up progress.

Regarding (ipod) bootloader installation, I've been making progress with cleaning up ipodpatcher internally, to make it more suitable for inclusion in rbutil, and I think it is about there now.

I don't really want to get involved with wxwidgets, and I'm guessing you may not want to get down and dirty with the ipodpatcher internals, so maybe if you provided the GUI parts of the ipod bootloader installation, I could fill in the details with code from ipodpatcher?

[Llorean]

I say let the user pick their device from a list of drives for the time being. Auto-detection can be grafted in later, but as it seems something that not only may be hard to do, but may not be reliable once it's done, I think it's probably not best to set it as a sticking point for 1.0 (maybe 2.0?)

[GodEater]

It does occur to me that most iPod's mount as a volume called "so-and-so's iPOD" under windows, and my Gigabeat shows up as a volume called "GIGABEAT". iRiver H1x0s default to something similar - is that too trivial a solution ?

[Llorean]

Considering I at least have renamed all of my devices, it'd be a solution for less savvy users at least.

I still think a drop-down list of drives ought to be good enough. Maybe using that to select one based on volume name to have as the originally selected device.

As far as I'm concerned, a list is ALWAYS essential, since someone may be silly and have two devices attached, so at best it should just "suggest" a drive, rather than automatically using one. While I assume it wouldn't go off and run on a drive without asking for user confirmation, a list-with-suggestion model now would allow us to just slip in better detection behind the scenes later without changing the interface on users at any point.