DOSPackets documentation

[rams]

I am toying with Handlers and would really love to know what each DOSPacket enumeration mean. I can find the list of defined packets but no further info. Which is odd. Does anyone know where I could get a comprehensive info about them?



(I suspect that the packet may mean different things for different devices / handlers but, for example, info about basic file and directory handling packets would be awesome for starters).



Thanks!

[Thomas Richter]

Information on this stuff is notoriously bad, partially because it came from another team and another operating system (Tripos). As such, only the absolute minimum amount of information made it into the "includes and autodocs" as the dos.library is/was actually only a minimal compatibility layer between AmigaOs and the Tripos kernel it implements. Thus, there was potentially much more documentation and includes available at the Tripos side which was never carried over to the "tiny" C interface which became the dos.library.

The official documentation for this is the Bantam Books "AmigaDOS Manual", 3rd Edition which is (surprise, surprise) quite close to the Tripos manual. It is a book, not a series of include files. Those would be in BCPL anyhow.

The best documentation of this is certainly Ralph Babel's "Guru Book" which contains not only a comprehensive list of Dos Packets, but also pitfalls for handler implementation.

This said, there is certainly a lack of an RKRM look-alike that covers the dos.library, handlers and the shell. At least for the latter I tried to write down things...

[thomas]

https://wiki.amigaos.net/amiga/autod...ackets.doc.txt

[bebbo]

This FileSystemVectorPort thingy is not known in the AmigaOS NDK 3.2
... I guess that also some modern packets aren't correct there.

e.g.:
ACTION_SHUTDOWN: unknown.
ACTION_DIE: known and not obsolete
...

[Niklas]

The page that Thomas linked to looks pretty comprehensive. This page http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD.../node005E.html gives a good overview as well.

[rams]

Thanks! I believe I'll get started with this.

[paraj]

Lots of good advice already, but I also found looking at what PFS3 does helpful.