Squashfs

Well my last post elicited a response from Mr Lougher the squashfs author. Just not one I was expecting. Apparently he did receive one of my emails (I sent five in total) to which he has not replied as I have accidentally come across as critical.

This is absolutely not my intent and I wish to publicly say that, It would have perhaps been more constructive to actually tell me this by email and this misunderstanding could have been avoided.

For reference The final email in the series is reproduced below, if I have been overly unhelpful please let me know in the comments so I can avoid this mistake in future.

Hi, we are using Squashfs and have come across several issues. We

initialy tried to use the Debian source package of the 4.0 release but

then moved to using the the CVS edition which fixed some bugs but had

issues of its own.

Couple of things to start with:

- The commit you made recently titled "Change get_basename() to use

getcwd rather than getting the PWD env var." does not seem to be

what you intended?

http://squashfs.cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/squashfs/squashfs/squashfs-tools/mksquashfs.c?r1=1.145&r2=1.146

- I would like to assist in improving these tools so they work better

for our use cases. To aid in this have you considered updating the

revision control system the project is kept in? an SVN or GIT

repository is much easier to work with than CVS.

- I will probably assist with maintainership of the Debian and Ubuntu

packages (I am a Debian Developer ) and would

like to bring a couple of patches to your attention, one to avoid a

division by zero error and a second to enable building with

alternative libc. These are both attached to this mail.

- The tools currently make a number of assumptions about structure

alignment which are incorrect on some architectures. I am crafting

a patch to address this which should make the tools work correctly

on ARM (they currently simply segfault).

I hope this is seen as constructive and we can work together to

improve this software. If you do not feel you want to interact with me

and choose to take a differnt route, please let me know at your earliest

conveniance.

I do hope that Mr. Lougher will accept that I intended to be helpful and constructive and not cause offence. I have chosen to use the blog format for this as that is the form I made the previous complaint and also email between myself and Mr. Lougher appears somewhat erratic.

It should be noted that some of there points have already been addressed, however there are several more issues which I hope to be able to contribute towards.