Re: [boost] Re: Re: Filesystem Library: Formal Review

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-09-16 04:01:06

Jaap Suter wrote:
>>>It would be nice to implement access to a zip or tar file, for example,
>>>as a read-only filesystem.  (Or maybe even read-write!)
>>
> 
> Yeah, that was my original idea. That is the main advantage of using
> packages. However, compression is beyond the scope of the FileSystem
> library, so imho it should be written on top of it.

I think everybody had ideas of this kind. However, the filesystem 
library provides access to one filesystem -- the native one for current 
platform. In my opinion (which I expressed briefly before), if you want
fancy things like support to tar.gz, zip, ftp &c. you'd need many 
filesystem *classes* (not freestanding function), and some base 
filesystem interface.

When I said that before, the comment from Beman was that it's out of the 
scope of the filesystem library, and I agree to that. Tar should be part 
of some future URL library (e.g. in KDE you can address files in tar 
archive using URL).

>>A tar file shouldn't be too difficult, not sure about a gzipped tar file.
> 
> I
> 
>>have two weeks with not much to do coming up so I might be able to try and
>>get something that can read from a .tar file in the same interface as the
>>B::FS classes.

You'd have to use your own version of filesystem::path and your own 
version of filesystem/operators.hpp. I'm not sure if this will be 
convenient.

- Volodya