Steve Ratcliffe wrote:

On Wed, Apr 08, 2009 at 07:36:09PM +0200, Bernhard Heibler wrote:

Is there anybody who wants to join me in understanding the MDR file ?  I  
did already some research on the MDR file. Most of the sections I have  
not decoded until now. The MDR file has about 20 mysterious sections.  
What I found out so far is that we need at least 7 sections to enable  
the Nuvi address search. I found this out by removing section by section  
out of the header of a working MDR file. I have added some code to  
libgarmin to display some sections of the MDR. I'm able to decode some  
parts of the city, street and region index.


Have you looked at the MdrDisplay program in the display svn:
http://svn.mkgmap.org.uk/display/trunk/src/test/display/MdrDisplay.java
This contains everything I know about the format.  Hopefully
you can add to that knowledge.

Is it possible to run a wiki page (or a set of wiki pages) so as to accumulate reverse-engineered knowledge on a file format?
I've been in other situations where this sort of idea seemed to be the "right way" to go about it, but in practice it seems to be easier said than done. Especially for documenting a file-format.

The problem for mkgmap developers as I see it right now is that John Mechelas's 2005 documents are often cited as the starting point, with Steve Ratcliffe's extensions to that knowledge being partially written up as documents (in a different style) and partially represented as the code in a bunch of .java programs. There are probably many other contributors whose work is only seen in the form of code in the .java programs. But currently, there is no place for a newcomer to go to read up on this stuff.

I think a wiki page (if it could be kept in a unified format) would win over some documentation file kept under SVN. Anyone got any better ideas?

Steve