A BrightSign consultant ran our v1.9.29-rc2 autorun.zip through BSN.cloud's
automated deployment. The archive reached the player and then could not be
opened — reported as invalid. Two causes, both ours.
1. COMPRESSION. We built with default deflate. The player bootstrap extracts
autozip.brs by itself before any script runs, and roBrightPackage supports a
specific set of methods, of which "no compression" is the universally safe
one. Both builders now store: scripts/build-autorun-zip.sh passes -0, and the
server-side package builder used archiver level 9 — maximum deflate — so
EVERY self-update package it produced would have failed the same way, silently
and in the field.
2. THE UNPACK API. We used roUnzip; BrightSign's own tooling uses
roBrightPackage. Converted in autozip.brs and in the self-update path.
This is the failure mode worth naming: a compressed package uploads, downloads
and deploys perfectly, then fails to open on the player. It reads as a broken
deployment rather than a broken zip, so it gets debugged everywhere except where
the bug is. Both builders now ASSERT the property rather than trusting the flag —
the build script walks `unzip -v` and refuses a compressed member, and a test
walks the local file headers of the server-built package checking method 0.
Verified by negative control: re-enabling compression fails the test.
Also adopted the shipped volume-discovery pattern in autozip.brs — probe
USB1:/SD:/SSD:/FLASH: for the archive instead of guessing two volumes. The unit
that drove this port boots from FLASH because its card interface is dead, and
extracting to a volume that does not exist fails silently.
1056 pass.
Reported by giyokun, who was right about both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
Four loose files that must all land intact, in the right place, is a poor way to
hand someone a player. autorun.zip is one file: drop it on the root of a
player's storage, power-cycle, and autozip.brs unpacks it in place and reboots
into the player. A half-copied set of loose files boots into something broken; a
half-copied zip simply fails to extract and leaves the player as it was.
Two rules the format imposes, both of which fail SILENTLY when broken, so the
build script asserts them instead of trusting them:
- the archive must expand to files at its root, with no wrapper directory. A
player extracts to the storage root, so a nested folder puts autorun.brs
somewhere the player never looks and the card appears to do nothing.
- autorun.brs must not sit next to autorun.zip on the storage root; its
presence stops the zip being processed at all.
autozip.brs renames the archive to autorun.zip.done after a successful extract,
which is what makes it idempotent — without that the player extracts, reboots,
extracts, reboots, a loop indistinguishable from a hardware fault. A FAILED
extract deliberately does not rename, so a truncated copy gets retried once
someone replaces it rather than being skipped forever.
It is volume-aware for the same reason autorun.brs is: a player may be booting
from internal flash because its card interface is dead, and extracting to "SD:/"
on such a unit writes to a volume that does not exist.
--server rewrites screentinker.json in the staging copy so a batch can be imaged
for a specific instance without hand-editing anything.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uaeo9MvzKoyXuN6ZsbhtkL
