Hi All, I have done a bit of work using libcurl, and have already got a very basic ReaderWriterCURL written, and it looks like it'll be easy to add this directly into the core OSG as a new OSGPL'd plugin.
Right now osgDB::Registry is hard-wired to use the existing .net plugin whenever there is call involving http:// in its filename. With a new libcurl we'd either need to change osgDB so that is detects the presence of the libcurl based plugin and chooses this as the plugin to use or replace the existing .net plugin. Retaining both would would complicate osgDB::Registry a little but not hugely. The other route would of replacing the existing and move the .net plugin out into the deprecated annex of the OSG. The upside of this is that it would resolve the issue of the .net plugin containing GPL'd code, something that doesn't sit well with the OSG's more liberal license, and certainly not with usage with non GPL'd applications (although technically runtime loading of GPL'd plugins within a non GPL'd harness doesn't break the GPL, in spirit of how many contribute to GPL'd projects its a no no.) The downside of replacing the .net plugin with a libcurl based on is that it adds libcurl as an external dependency. CMake handles part of this thanks to its ability to automatically detect libraries and compile the relevant parts into build system. The extra dependencies is easy for unices, especially linux, but for windows it'll probably require libcurl to be added to the 3rd party dependency package, for this I have to rely on the generosity of Mike Weiblen and fellow Windows helpers. The upside with libcurl is that is supports multiple protocols, including ftp, ftps, https, password handling etc. My thought was to forward declare CURL in osgDB and allow it to be passed in via osgDB::ReaderWriter::Options so that users can do custom libcurl ops and then let the OSG plugin do the reading. Thoughts? Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openscenegraph.org/listinfo.cgi/osg-users-openscenegraph.org
