Re: More GSoC project ideas.
* Raymond Wiker <rwiker(a)gmail.com> writes:
I've got one suggestion if you're (still) collecting ideas
for GSoC:
The current package system uses efs, which uses ftp, via an external
process. The interface to ftp has some fairly heavy assumptions on
the actual version of ftp being used, and for some platforms, these
assumptions do not hold.
Do you mean that EFS has some assumptions on the version of ftp being
used? EFS is customisable.
Even worse, some platforms do not even come with an ftp client.
Can you name a platform where an FTP client is not available (I didn't
say "not installed by default")?
My suggestion would be to allow the package system to use http; this
could be done without using any external processes at all, by setting
up network connections, firing off HTTP requests and parsing response
documents.
This is a pretty good idea, in fact a few years ago I hacked PUI to do
exactly this, and it worked great. Then I discovered a couple of
things...
1) ALL of the XEmacs packages sites are using FTP (well of course they
are)
2) A good number of them are NOT listening on HTTP (I seem to remember
that it was only a tiny fraction of them that were).
The main problem with doing this as GSoC task may well be that it is
too simple...
Yeah, if _I_ can do it, anyone can. :-)
A better way is FFI and libcurl. SXEmacs uses EFS for normal packaging
operations, but we use ffi-curl.el to "bootstrap" which installs EFS and
xemacs-base.
--
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