AdvancedFileAccess

Advanced File Access

The current method of interacting with files in Inkscape is limited. This feature proposal explores ways it can be replaced with a more powerful, more capable system.

Requirements

As a minimum, the new system must fulfil the following needs:

Additionally, the following properties are highly desireable:

• WebDAV support
• FTP support

Further, the following capabilities have been mentioned as somewhat desireable:

Finally, there are some capabilities that are distinctly *not* needed:

Options

GNOME-VFS

Filesystem abstraction layer

Pros:

• High level interface to internet-based file access
• Asynchronous file ops
• File monitoring
• Operation cancellation
• Bulk file operations
• MIME typing
• Inet connections & operations
• Abiword uses it
• Has been ported to Win32

Cons:

• API documentation is spotty
• Many dependencies: libbonobo, libbz2, fam, libgcrypt, libpopt, libtasn, gconf, glib, gnutls, orbit2, libxml, zlib and gnome-mime-data. (but is included in every distro. that has GNOME and many dependencies only result in reduced functionality not the inability to build)

Questions:

• Is it available on OSX?

Neon - http://www.webdav.org/neon/

HTTP and WebDAV client library.

Pros:

• Provides HTTP/WebDAV methods
• Support for OpenSSL, proxy, authentication
• WebDAV metadata properties
• Embeddable into a source tree

Cons:

• API is not yet stable and subject to major changes

Questions:

• Does it work on Win32?
• Does it work on OSX?

libgsf

Utility lib for reading/writing structured file formats.

Pros:

• Provides svgz, copy/paste, BonoboStream, and Win32 Istream support
• Support for OLE2 streams, zip input
• Used in gnumeric, mrproject, abiword, libwv2, koffice, and also part of the AAF format.
• Lite dependencies: glib, zlib, libxml2

Cons:

• May be more GNOME-dependent than we would wish
• Insufficient documentation

Questions: