Re: [Arx-users] useful lib...

[Walter Landry]

Amine Chadly <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi guys,
> First of all, congrats for the activity lately ;-).
> I am currently moving and can't be useful to arx, but I might be able
> to join the effort soon...
> I think I read fairly recently that the use of gnomevfs is the major
> obstacle to porting arx to other platforms.
> I was wondering if you considered using libcurl to get the files...
> you can find it at :
> http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/

I considered curl when I was looking at networking libraries.
Unfortuntately, curl does not support sftp.  That is a deal-breaker
for me, since that is probably the only protocol I really use.
However, there is silc

  http://silcnet.org/docs/toolkit/silcsftplib.html

But then I would have to deal with three different possibilities:
local, networked non-sftp, networked sftp.  With gnome-vfs local and
remote are the same.  Plus it has the added benefit of all of the
wacky protocols that gnome-vfs supports.

> and it can understand a quite impressive number of protocols, and last
> but not the list, the number of platforms it works on is just as
> impressive...
> I would have loved to try it before posting this, specially because Walter
> said the number of files involved is rather small :
> 
> src/arx/utility_functions/edit_path.cpp
> src/arx/utility_functions/make_non_writeable.cpp
> src/arx/utility_functions/property_action.cpp
> src/arx/utility_functions/do_patch/apply_patches/patch_file.cpp
> (according to the 27.11.2004 post -- yes I am in europe ;-).
> 
> But for the reasons I mentioned in the begining of the post, 
> I prefer to tell you about it and get you feedback.
> 
> So what do you think about it ?

An interesting thing to do would be to just replace gnome-vfs with
boost::filesystem.  You will have to do some hacking in
boost::filesystem because I have modified it to use hard links.  After
that, and fixing up the files you mention (the only problem is that
they call chmod), everything should, in theory ;), work.

As an aside, I have done some work on the getting ArX working under
Cygwin.  It compiles and I can run through parts of the test suite,
but I am having problems running "fork".  So I feel I am getting close.

Cheers,
Walter