From: Dom Lachowicz (domlachowicz@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Oct 26 2003 - 19:21:18 EST
> Windows system have a wininet.dll library that
> provides the same services
> (different API) that libcurl does. To use libcurl to
> read remote file under
> win32 is unnecessary. Not to mention that libcurl
> will not honor any possible
> proxy or Internet settings that you have defined in
> your win32 system.
Yeah. GSF doesn't have to use things like Curl, or
doesn't have to use them on your platform. It could
use the Wininet stuff. It's *trivial* do to this type
of integration and it's exactly the type of stuff that
we'd love for you to get involved with. Just because
it doesn't do so yet doesn't meant that it can't do
this, or that we shouldn't do this.
GSF will use native win32 stuff. And native QNX stuff.
And native MacOSX stuff. But only if you code it :)
> Well, for you non-win32 all of these can be very
> cool but in win32 we already
> have all of this very handy.
No, you don't have this functionality in the Win32
port of Abi. The fact that libgsf will wrap the native
functionality all the while providing a single and
sane interface across all our platforms is a large
part of what I'm advocating.
It also transparently handles
compressing/decompressing documents using bz2 or gzip.
Plus, GSF handles compound documents well and provides
a simple, unified interface for doing this. This means
that GSF can read and write things like OLE2, ZIP,
TAR.GZ. Win32 has native OLE2 functionality. ZIP,
TAR.GZ? Not so much... If you want things like
OpenOffice, StarWriter, MSWord, KOffice, WordPerfect,
etc... you really need to either:
1) Use libgsf
2) Reinvent something like libgsf
> I would like to see all of this libgsf giving
> benefit to all of you non-win32
> systems, but also not adding unnecesary overhead on
> the win32.
>
> A part of that, I think that is cool that people
> from diffent projects
> (Gnumeric, Abiword, etc) work together to share
> code!
Indeed.
LibGSF doesn't have any dependencies except for
Glib-2.0 and zlib really. Everything else (network
layers, IStream, ADODB::Stream, ...) is optional
add-ons. It wants to be pluggable. It wants to
integrate with the native OS in ways that the OS
doesn't even yet integrate with itself. It's just
waiting for you to add the code in some areas.
Best regards,
Dom
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