Since KiCad has been retrieving files from the internet ever since Dick's github plugin was committed, we now have at least 2 sources of files: local and those retrieved via URN (of course local files can be thought of as a URN as well). I have also been thinking that our text files take up a lot of space (KiCad files as well as VRML, X3D and in the future IGES and STEP).
I have other priorities at the moment (which will probably take me until the end of this year or even longer), but what are people's thoughts on: a. Abstracting a stream class which can magically support file retrieval by http, local files, and perhaps github (I know next to nothing about how github works) and local file writing. b. The stream class can automatically inflate *.gz files (basically files compressed by zlib and with .gz at the end). Supporting *.gz can typically shrink footprint files to 30-40% of the uncompressed size and VRML files can often compress to <15% of the original size and large STEP and IGES files can compress to 10% of the original. In principle we can also enable a flag to write as gz, but of course no data can actually be written until 'close()' is invoked. Dealing with external libraries will be a mix still since we have no control of their file operations other than stdin/out/err if we're lucky. I include the IGES library in development as an external lib; in fact even if we do put IGES support into KiCad using that library it may make sense to keep libIGES an external project. - Cirilo
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