As XBMC does not support relative paths (and resolves internally mapped drive letters to absolute paths in the 'path' table), one can not use the Library mode when using XBMC on a USB drive with a changing drive letter.
Is there any outlook on the implementation of a "home://" internal drive letter designation to accomodate for relative paths ?
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/5162
make it special://home/ please in the patch you obviously plan to submit since you opened a thread in the dev forum
I am happy to bollocks up xbmc code, but as I don't know python and am not familiar with xbmc coding style I don't think you would want me in there.
If someone could hint me in the right direction (i.e. which files are likely to refer to drive letter code) I would be happy to give it a go and tinker with the svn code myself.
Lucky for you xbmc is C++. See xbmc/Application.cpp and xbmc/Util.cpp for a start.
We'll plan to change from drive letters to special path but I dunno if this address your problem. Even the special paths will be resolved to absolute path in the DB afaik. I would say this is a principal question on how we wanna store the paths in the DB.
Hmmm...I see.
Conceptually it would be polite if XBMC would allow for both relative and absolute paths. If I were to move XBMC to a different folder on the same hard disk, should things then still work or should this require reinstallation / rebuilding the database ? Having "home://" or "special://home" or the internal drive letters says "relative", but having the DB resolve paths says "absolute".
Also implementing a relative-to-absolute-path translator should leave all other code untouched.
(Thanks for having me on this forum + you are doing a great job + I can't code C++ and therefore should basically shut up :-)