need to be able to specify the full output file path/name from the command line

[jhoblitt]

ppImage currently mangles the output filename is various different ways
depending on the recipe being used and will likely varry from one camera config
to another. It is extremely tedious to have to encode this 'mangling knowledge'
into every program that wants to interact with ppImage. Even worse, this
behavor could mess up interactions with Nebulous as the desitnately URI will
probably have to be passed to ppImage via the pXtool helper scripts.

[Paul Price]

This is part of the pmFPAfile handling.

It may be possible to deduce the filenames from the camera configuration file.

Gene?

[eugene]

the complexity of this problem is that ppImage has a large number of possible
output files it can produce depending on the circumstance. not only are there
many different types of output files, there is also the problem of handling the
many related files that are needed when running a split image. my thoughts in
defining the pmFPAfile stuff and the camera config stuff was that there are
really three options available to us:

1) have every output file specified on the input line.
2) have a fixed set of output naming conventions
3) have a rule-based set of naming conventions

the first option seems impractical. not only would the user have to specify a
large number of output files on the command line, but in cases where there are
many chips, there would have to be sometimes 64*N output entries.

the second seems to inflexible. not only does it make changing the naming
structure a pain, but it make it difficult to support existing camera which
already have defined their naming rules (and differently from each other, of
course).

thus, i landed on the third option: the camera config file defines the rules for
generating the file names of interest based on abstract file names. there is an
existing function in the pmFPAfile stuff to determine the true file names given
some input (or maybe this is embedded in a pmFPAfile function - my brain is
still somewhat jetlagged).

For any programs which already load the config info, it should be trivial to use
these same functions to determine the output file names. for external programs
that don't use the psModules tools to load the config info, we can write a
simple command-line program to take the abstract names and additional needed
infor (chip ID, eg) and return the name of the output file.

i can take a look at this over the weekend.

[Paul Price]

I think the solution is to have a Perl module that will read the camera
configuration and interpolate the correct filename. I don't think it should be
too hard, so long as the value in the curly brackets {} is available (which it
should be if it is {CHIP.NAME} --- it is the class id). I will see about trying
this this afternoon.

[eugene]

done: we added the perl function paul mentions