[Ardour-Dev] Trouble with imported files

[Paul Davis]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 9:03 PM, Fons Adriaensen <fons at kokkinizita.net>wrote:

>
> When they are on the same mount point Ardour makes
> a hard link in the session directory and puts the
> local path into the .ardour file.


The goal was to avoid creating havoc through accidental deletion or movement
of files external to the session. The user could do this and the session
would continue to function just fine.

The directory structures on all the computers
> involved are identical,


quite a specialized use case, then.


> so even when external
> files are used it should be possible to move
> the session without editing the .ardour file.
>
> But when a session and the audio files it
> depends on are copied we end up with two
> copies of each audio file. And it is not
> possible to remove either of them


sounds like your using the wrong tool to make the copy. what are you using?
i am fairly sure that tar(1) will preserve the links *as links*, and not
pretend that there are actually two copies. what filesystem are you using on
the USB sticks?

So what was intended to be shared by many
> sessions get assimilated, Borg style, by
> each of then when that session is moved.
> Resistance seems to be futile.


but the "assimilation" happened at the copy step, no? before the copy, there
was one instance of the file with two hard links. after the copy, on the
destination filesystem, there are two copies of the file. why is this
ardour's fault?

IOHI, this trick of making hard links to make
> it appear as if the session is using local
> files is bad idea. It leads to inconsistent
> results depending on something the user is
> usually not even aware of. Things would be
> much simpler if Ardour would just always
> treat an external file as external and not
> try to subvert the user's intentions.


we are not trying to subvert the user's intention. we had many early losers
who careless/accidental actions would break sessions. using a hard link
fixed this.

now, it has to be said that since we now handle missing audio files in a
more-or-less reasonable fashion, its not so clear that this FS-dependent
approach is really the best one anymore. it does still have some nice
properties, but i can see an argument for its removal.

removing it means commenting out about 3 lines of code.
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