AdvancedFileAccess

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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 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: