[Arx-users] Welcome to ArX

[Walter Landry]

Greetings,

I thought I would take this email to discuss what my future plans are
for ArX.  You can get a rough version of that by looking at the bugs
in the bug tracker.  I re-entered all of the old bugs that I could
find.  To be more specific:

  1) Rewrite ArX in C++.  This will speed it up a lot, make it a lot
     more robust, and in general make it easier for me to accomplish
     everything else.  It will also clean up a lot of smaller bugs
     along the way.  I've got about a dozen small commands done, with
     many left to do.

  2) Write a simple merging gui in emacs.  For a first pass, I'm
     pretty close to it already.  I only have to link together ediff
     and the output from update, replay, and star-merge.

  3) Integrity Checks (bug 4785)

  4) Internationalization, which will also cover spaces in filenames
     (bug 4799)

  5) Localization (bug 4859)

  6) Simplified Mirroring (bug 4796)

In addition, in the far future I plan some more drastic changes.  Some
of these may require incompatible changes.

  A) Make the archive patching strategy configurable (bug 4787).

  B) Remove the pristine trees (bug 4788).

  C) Remove versions, or make them optional (bug ).

Many of the other bugs will get corrected in the course of fixing
these bugs.  Some may not, simply because they are not a priority for
me.  Others are too much work or don't yet have good solutions
(e.g. #4798).

Right now, I am about 80% of the way through reimplementing inventory.
it seemed like the best way to fix bugs 4769 and 4762.  After that, I
may do some more smaller commands, or I may jump in and do mkpatch and
dopatch.

For the networking part, I may use either libcurl or gnome-vfs.
gnome-vfs is a huge dependency, but seems to have everything.  libcurl
has everything except sftp, which is pretty critical.  So if we used
libcurl, we would have to port Scott Parish's work from hackerlab to C++.

Regards,
Walter