Portable Playlist - User manual + Technical documentation

[porg]

RetroArch has a so called Portable Playlist feature.

• But it is totally undocumented!

  • Only a few rumors and bad guesses on some user forums.
  • And 3 issues in the issue tracker and a few related pull requests, which only talk about some very particulars
  • But the official documentation contains nothing on it
  • But nowhere a wholistic documentation

• It should be in the official documentation, ideally at roms-playlists-thumbnails.md and decribe:

  • How this shall work from the user perspective (in the GUI and when manually creating .LPL files)
    • And the maintenance advantages when moving those portable playlists between systems
      • with different filepath conventions (Windows, Android, macOS)
      • and/or different device/drive/folder structure.
  • And how it works on a technical level:
    • The interplay between each items[] → path and the base_content_directory in the root of the LPL.
    • I also saw examples where base_content_directory can not only take an absolute path (the base path) but seemingly can also contain some flags like M|, !r, W{, but nothing of this is documented.
  • So before spending hours and days of trial and error, I'd really appreciate if some of the involved developers could document this feature.

[porg]

@Ryunam you seem to have been involved with this feature.

• Could you please document it?
• Or recommend/ping someone else who may have the knowledge?

[Ryunam]

@porg Hi! I have been involved merely as a user of this feature. I am still using it extensively across my devices and I did dabble in the code to fix a minor issue some time ago, but I was not the one who programmed it in the first place.

That said, barring time constraints which are unfortunately quite substantial these days, I can give it a try and work on the documentation. I can't guarantee any specific ETA, but I will take the task into consideration for sure.

[porg]

So you certainly have enough knowhow about the user manual aspects of this! Which would already greatly benefit the user community!

Thanks that you consider it! If there’s progress then please ping me here! And I could then look at it, try it in practise, and report whether it’s accurate and comprehensible.