[Gnu-arch-users] tla on win32

[Johannes Berg]

Hi,

so, as promised, here are my comments.

1) current situation

I think my approach has hit a dead-end. Its fairly unsupportable right
now because of the tools dependencies. Basically, I'm not qualified
enough to hack the gnu tools; I've not gotten them to work properly with
hackerlab as a backend while cross-compiling. Maybe I'm missing
something obvious, maybe its harder than it looks.

2) wishes

ultimately, I think what we want is a tla that
  a) works on any win32 (say 95 with winsock2 update upwards)
  b) (thus) works on FAT
  c) has no other dependencies
  d) (optionally) can use long paths on NTFS

3) What do we need for that?

  a) working gnu tools with a hackerlab backend
     as noted above, I've not managed to get this sorted out perfectly.
     I think I have diff/diff3 but tar is problematic
  b) we want a tar that links libz.so/zlib1.dll to write compressed
     archives. I think this is possible to implement via the remote
     archive handler stuff in tar, or maybe better via a new vu layer
     once we have a tar that uses hackerlab (easy then, if a -z option
     is found push a zlib vu handler, if its possible to use separate
     vu handlers for file and archive access)

So far, we can offer:
  - path compression (Lode Leroy)
  - port to the native API (myself)

I think it would be fairly easy to go back into hackerlab and change it
to use the FileA instead of the FileW API and use only short paths
together with path compression. Or have 2 implementations that can be
used depending if tla was compiled for 9x support or NT support.

The one thing that'll always be missing for 9x is hardlinks, so there we
cannot support revision libraries properly. Similar on NT4, because
there you need elevated privileges to create hardlinks.

johannes
-- 
http://www.sipsolutions.de/
Key-ID: 9AB78CA5 Johannes Martin Berg <address@hidden>

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