announcing darcs

[Alastair Reid]

David Roundy <droundy@abridgegame.org> writes:
> Indeed, libcurl is nicely portable, but I doubt my code to lazily
> link to the libcurl library is portable.  I use pthread_create and
> pipe to let curl do the downloading asynchronously...  I'm not sure
> how portable either of those system calls are. 

Anything to do with creating threads or processes is likely to have
porting problems in my experience.

I had a quick glance at the libcurl overview

  http://pinkstuff.publication.org.uk/cgi-bin/man2html?libcurl+5#lbAF

and thought it could be used portably.  Seems like I missed something.

Alastair:
>> This reminds me of a library I have been wanting for a while [...]

David:
> For my purposes, I think a simpler system would be acceptable [...]

Ah, you actually want something different from what I proposed.  (I
thought of the possibility as I was writing it but dismissed it as
being of little use - your example shows exactly when it is useful.
The real world is always tricker than you like to think...)

What I proposed was that the library would parse filenames according to 
the local conventions on your machine - win32, unix, macintosh, etc.

What you need is a set of libraries to parse filenames according to a
set of conventions.  For example, you might need to convert win32
filenames to unix filenames and back again.

> If I ever get around to porting to windows (which I'm unlikely do
> myself, since I don't have windows, and don't relish the idea of
> trying to set up an mingw ghc cross-compiler) I'll see if I can
> figure out a nice way to package the filename code...  :)

I can't help you gain access to windows but Hugs is many, many times
easier to install than GHC - you don't need mingw, cygwin or anything
like that.  (Truth in advertising: to use the ffi (e.g., to interface
to libcurl), you do need a C compiler :-()

--
Alastair Reid                 alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk  
Reid Consulting (UK) Limited  http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/