a2stuff / a2stuff/a2d

Issues with the new 8 drives per slot feature of ProDOS8 2.5

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ProDOS 2.5
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Description

It's not actually a bug, but one issue I've run into while testing both the A2D 1.2 pre-alpha 8 (which is incredibly awesome, BTW) and the ProDOS8 2.5 alpha 7 on my Apple //e is that A2D does not play nice with the new feature of more than 2 drives per slot of ProDOS 2.5 (https://github.com/ProDOS-8). It fails rather gracefully in that it justs duplicates the first two partitions of my CFFA card (that has 4 partitions). Although it seems to recognize that partitions 7/3 and 7/4 exist and are not currently remapped to slot 4 (as in every previous version of ProDOS, including 2.4.2), it apears to get confused and mounts partitions 1 and 2 twice on the desktop. Everything else works perfectly, and I had no issues launching any of the apps on my Selector List (they're all on the 1st and 2nd partitions), I just don't have access to any partitions beyond the first two.

ProDOS 2.5 is still in alpha, so only those users on the bleeding edge of Apple II software (a rather quaint concept in 2019) are likely to run into this issue for now, and it's not like anybody should be relying on pre-release software anyway (for the record, I only tried ProDOS 2.5 by booting from a floppy, my regular configuration boots 2.4.2, the stable release, and A2D 1.2-8 works fantastically with that).

This is more of a humble 'heads up' than a feature request or a bug report, seeing as both projects are currently in development, that perhaps it would be interesting to contemplate the new ProDOS features (2.5 also introduces support for lowercase file and volume names, and removes the 51 files limit on the root directory, though I didn't run into any issues with that in my limited testing), since it's likely that both projects share the same target audience.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Reproduce the issue using A2D 1.2 pre-alpha 8, ProDOS 2.5 alpha 7, an Apple //e, and a CFFA card with four partitions. Investigate how A2D maps ProDOS drives and verify that partitions 3 and 4 mount separately instead of duplicating partitions 1 and 2.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
operating-systems
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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