Michael Basler writes: > We certainly have to accept this. > > This said, it would be nice to find a way to enable "normal" Windows users > to run terrasync on a native Windows system (not being equipped with a > rsync.exe) without too much hassle. I for one would much regret if that > functionality were missing in the next official Windows binary port. > Besides, as several people already pointed out it's not just a neat feature > but even tangents design questions of FligthGear. > > I think there were a few proposals, and perhaps experts can come to a > decision.
I think this whole topic brings out some of the differences in unix culture vs. windows culture. Unix users love to build up collections of smaller apps with specific functionality and then find ways to build larger functionality out of these smaller utils by glueing them together with scripts, pipes, or occasionally a little C code. Then I suppose you have things like perl and python that come along and build in a lot of the low level functionality directly into the script language for performance reasons, but I digress ... Then in the windows culture, people expect larger, monolithic apps that do everything for everybody. There's good and bad points to each approach in terms of usability, development time, performance, etc. I'm not trying to start an OS discussion here. The point is, the terrasync util was developed in the spirit of the unix culture and builds on lower level tools which provide specific functionality. Essentially I yanked some of the nmea message parsing code out of flightgear, pasted that into the udp_client demo out of plib, added a function call to generate the scenery tree directory names for the current and surrounding locations, and hand that off to rsync to pull the data over. I think I had something working in under an hour, and I probably spent another hour or two after that tweaking an optimizing and doing some long test flights with accelerated time to see how far I could push things. It sounds like what we need is for someone to rewrite the rsync functionality (get a list of files in the remote directory, compare to the list of file in the local directory, delete any that aren't still on the server, and fetch any that are different or new on the server.) Do this all using the http protocol. But, personally, I feel like I have scratched my itch, the terrasync tool works for me, and I have no desire to reimpliment rsync which works beautifully already. I'm happy to answer questions for anyone who wants to work on a monolithic windows version themselves. Regards, Curt. -- Curtis Olson IVLab / HumanFIRST Program FlightGear Project Twin Cities [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Minnesota http://www.menet.umn.edu/~curt http://www.flightgear.org _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.flightgear.org/mailman/listinfo/flightgear-devel
