> Maybe, but there are reasons that those applications which strive to > be cross-platform do a lot of those things themselves. In order to > support paths with non-ASCII characters, each OS seems to have a > different proper way of doing this. At least on Win32 the only method > I'm aware of is through calls specifically to the Windows API. Since > SWORD tries to rely on as few external libraries as possible, it would > need to have lots of #ifdef segments. A front-end like Xiphos can get > away with a single call to the GTK/GLib libraries which handle those > OS-specific calls for them (and BT could use the Qt classes, etc).
Well, this would be true if SWORD didn't need to read/write at all, but it does, so it does need to do this correctly on all platforms. > understanding is that the InstallMgr library class usually needs to be > extended anyway by most of the applications, so adding the extra calls > at the application level can tackle: This isn't true. We don't extend InstallMgr at all. The reason given to extend was something to do with setting the decipher key, but that's easily handled elsewhere. >(a) non-ASCII usernames, (b) path > read/write permissions checks, (c) transport peculiarities like > proxies, NAT, etc all in one pass, with the support of whatever > external libraries the application is built on (GLib, Qt, XUL, python) > doing the cross-platform lifting instead of trying to figure out every > OS's requirements at the library level. It would be nice if that were true, but there are many other places where reading/writing is done, for example indexing, and retrieving information from modules. Also, we can't really handle proxies even if we extend installmgr without correcting things like ftpparse. A user just reported the inability to use installmgr through a proxy because of failures in ftpparse. I guess my point is, that SWORD is a large system. There's simply no way for an application to replace all of SWORD's i/o to handle all checks for write permissions, etc. Matthew _______________________________________________ sword-devel mailing list: sword-devel@crosswire.org http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel Instructions to unsubscribe/change your settings at above page
