[sword-devel] InstallMgr

[Troy A. Griffitts]

Dear DM and other,

> Maybe someone can help a bit. The problem we ran into was that there was 
> no reliable way to download a folder via http and there was no way to 
> reliably know the content of the folder.

Yes, agreed, this is why implementing this on the C++ side is not yet 
complete.  It is not a trivial task to attempt to parse many different 
web server folder listing output formats and boil those contents down to 
a file/directory list, as DM has noted.

On the FTP side we use a crazy 3rd party routine called ftpparse (which 
popped up recently regarding license header info).

Someone needs to write/find an httpparse counterpart which does the 
same.  Then we can officially support HTTP as well.

BUT PLEASE DON'T MISS THE POINT OF MY CAPS FROM THE LAST MESSAGE :)

mods.d.tar.gz is for OPTIMIZATION / CACHING.
a future zips/<modulename>.zip would be OPTIMIZATION / CACHING.

These are extra-- above and beyond the requirements for a functioning 
repository.

A repository should not be required-- and is currently NOT required-- to 
generate these.

The C++ engine works fine without these.

The point being that JSword should support the already existing methods 
outlined in the previous email AT LEAST (I believe what is missing is 
FTP support and the new autodiscovery support).

Please don't misinterpret this as me being closed to adding new 
functionality.  I am merely stressing the importance for us all to get 
up to the same level of very basic install functionality so we have a 
very clear message of what our supported install mechanism are across 
all SWORD applications.

Defining additional optional methods are a separate matter, and we 
should (HTTP, SFTP, and others)

I hear apache commons has a nice FTP library for Java. :)


	-Troy.