Re: [Arx-users] Reasons not to switch to ArX

[Walter Landry]

Kevin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:
> At work, one of our projects is seriously considering switching to 
> Subversion (from CVS). While I think svn is a worthy replacement for 
> cvs, I don't see it as the ideal long-term option. This event has 
> re-invigorated my interest in ArX, although I still have too many other 
> vastly time-consuming projects going on right now to be able to 
> contribute much to ArX.
> 
> For them, ArX is missing:
> 
> 1. Full MS Windows support. They use Linux, MS Windows, and Mac, so 
> running on all three is absolutely mandatory. Any idea how far away we 
> are from native (not cygwin) compatibility? I might even be able to 
> sponsor a small amount of development on this.

There are two things that have to be replaced: the virtual filesystem
code (gvfs.hpp) and the process spawn code (Spawn.hpp).  One option
that was not previously available is to use Qt.  Since they recently
started offering Qt/Windows under the GPL, we can use that.  However,
it doesn't look like plain Qt supports any secure protocol (sftp, ssh
or https).  KDE supports it through kio-slaves, but I do not know how
hard it is to get those working in a pure Win32 environment.

I touched on some other networking options previously [1].  You would
also have to do something for the process spawn stuff.  If you are a
half-decent Win32 programmer, it should be no big deal.

So, to answer your question, a few weeks work by the right people.

> 2. Some kind of GUI front end. A few users strongly dislike command-line 
> tools, so a front end that allowed basic operations would probably be a 
> "must have" feature (unless #3 below were available).

I don't know of any work being done on this.  There are some tla
gui's, and it should not be too hard to modify them.

> 3. An eclipse plug-in. They could live without this, but if ArX had a 
> good one, it would be a "killer feature" for many users. Especially if 
> it were integrated with the refactoring tools so history would be 
> preserved after a rename or move.

There has been some interest in this, but no work that I know of.

> Are there other features ArX doesn't yet have that would inspire more 
> people and projects to switch to it? After the boost license is fixed, 
> is there any reason not to do a major marketing campaign among Linux users?

I can't think of any.

Cheers,
Walter

[1] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/arx-users/2003-11/msg00003.html