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iustin / mt-st

Magnetic tape control tools for Linux SCSI tapes
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Add IBM 3590 B/E format to tape densities table #25

Closed dabiged closed 1 year ago

dabiged commented 1 year ago

This PR Adds one line to include the format code for the IBM 3590 E format cartridge.

I would like to add the IBM 3590 B format cartridge as well (its hex code is 0x29) but this code is already in use by the QIC-3080. I am not sure how to resolve this?

iustin commented 1 year ago

Hi, thanks for the patch. I'm not very familiar with how this should be handled, but looking at lines 158, 185-186 and other similar, it looks like conflicts are unavoidable, and they're only handled in text form? I'd suggest doing so, at least it's better than not having it at all.

There's a question how valid the old formats, like QIC-3080 are, but I don't know the answer to that.

dabiged commented 1 year ago

QIC is Quarter Inch Cartridge. 3080 is the 1.2 to 1.6GB variant. I have asked the tape sages around my neck of the woods and these are definitely still laying around.

As a compromise I have added the 3590 B format using the same syntax as line 194.

As an aside there seems to be multiple stylistic syntax flavours in there so I couldn't follow any one. i.e. for multiple tape types per hex code there are 3 types: line 175: "or" as separator { 0x26, "DDS-4 or QIC-4GB" },

line 185: ", or" as separator { 0x40, "DLT1 40 GB, or Ultrium" },

line194: "," as separator { 0x4a, "SDLT600, T10000A" },

Sometimes commas are used as a grammatical tool, not as a list separator: { 0x71, "IBM 3592 J1A, encrypted" },

I think there should be some cohesion around this but will leave it up to @iustin to decide what to do here.

I am happy to modify this syntax once a decision is made, but will likely do this in another PR.

iustin commented 1 year ago

I'm going to merge this. On the "how things should look", IMO (and I'm not the best person to answer, but): the simple comma is not readable to people not familiar with all tape format names. For me for example, the "SDLT600, T10000A" is not clear whether T10000A is a subvariant of SDLT600, or an entirely diferrent format.

So I would prefer if an explicit "or" is used to differentiate the formats.