>Does anyone know when the driver will be fully finished and released? Right
>now I am using the demo with a 32 meg ATA card and it usually works fine, a
>few errors caused total failure...
ATA Support 1.0 will be released when:
- the documentation will have been finished
- the known bugs will have been fixed:
* the eMate power bug
* the double No Partition bug
* the -10606 syndrome bug
* any other bug I'm not aware of
- the tests will have been entirely implemented.
I'm very close to 1.0.
In fact:
- the eMate bug will be fixed for RC3. I just didn't test RC2 in my
eMate so I reintroduced that bug by tweaking the power management
- the double No Partition bug will be fixed for RC3. I just didn't
take the time to fix that little cosmetic problem.
- I hope that the -10606 syndrome bug will go away with the new
organization of the software.
- the documentation mostly lacks newer screen shots.
- the tests are nearly finished. They mostly lack a nice user interface.
What might be in 1.0 and wasn't planned is Backups. This actually
will bring the usability of ATA cards to the one of linear cards.
I wonder what these few errors were that caused a total failure with
your card. I wonder if slow cards have problems or if it's a bug in
the transactional store engine. To be sure of that, RC3 will have an
option to check sectors when they're written.
As I stated it before, my concern is your data. ATA Support will be
considered a final product only if I think I won't make nightmares of
Newton users who lost a lot of data because of a failure in my
software.
Now, please note that I'm not working full time on ATA Support. To
make short, I'm also starting two PhDs, one in artificial
intelligence and one in philosophy and history of science.
The other thing is that I have started in June 2000 a soon
open-sourced framework to connect a Newton to any desktop computer
via the Dock program to replace Apple's DILs. I've transmitted it to
Nicolas Zinovieff, but it wasn't really usable (well, it compiled but
it didn't work without including a big hack made of Apple's DILs).
So for two weeks I mostly worked on making this framework usable. I
think that today, this library is mostly equivalent to the DILs, but
we didn't reach the state of NCU/NBU yet. Plus it only works on MacOS
and MacOS X (where IrDA and Serial aren't supported yet). For a week
now, Nicolas works on it alone as I also have to finish ATA Support.
He has been able with a sample code of this framework to install
packages in a row from his iBook running MacOS X (over TCP/IP and
EtherTalk).
Paul
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