Sadly spotted after TBA’s revival comes to a halt.
A piece of news that somehow passed me by is that a month after making the 26-bit version of TBAFS available for download, which was itself back in October 2011, an update to the 32-bit version was released – itself having been made available last May.
According to Alan Peters on the TBA Blog, “This fixes a bug in the TBA (Fast) decompression code that was introduced when it was converted to 32bit.” The software, version 1.03, is described on the download page as beta, suitable for RISC OS 5.17 and above, with a note that it’s untested on other versions of RISC OS, and that it therefore tests for RISC OS 5 in the !Run file.
TBAFS is a high performance image filing system, featuring optional Squash compression, long filename support, unlimited files per directory, fast indexed directory structure, and lazy write-back caching.
When the 32-bit version was made available, it was released as a beta, having only had limited testing, and it was described as not including journaling or any kind of internal resilience, and brought with it a recommendation not to store anything valuable using it – with the warning “The write-back cache is great for performance, but bad for resilience if your machine crashes in the middle of writing. You have been warned!”
Unfortunately, having completely missed the news of the 32-bit release of TBAFS before now, it came to my attention after spotting some more recent, less positive news.
Just over a year after Alan returned to the RISC OS development scene, he has had to cave in to what is an unfortunate reality for many of us: that there just aren’t enough hours in the day to deal with a the requirements of a real life – covering any or all of family, work and social life – and still have time to devote to RISC OS development. In a blog post explaining this, Alan finishes with “All I can promise is that I’ll keep an eye on the whole RISC OS world and contribute when I can.”
