PhysicsFS 1.1.1 development branch release...
Ryan C. Gordon
icculus at icculus.org
Tue Apr 3 01:28:39 EDT 2007
So it's been a long time, but now that some of my long-term contracts
have finished up, I explicitly allocated time to work on a few of my
open source projects...top among these is PhysicsFS, which hasn't seen a
new release in quite some time, despite a pretty big TODO list.
Please note that the 1.1 branch is still a work in progress, and all new
features (and several old ones) are likely to be buggy at this time.
APIs from the stable branch will not change, but all APIs from 1.1 are
still subject to change, addition, and removal. Use with caution.
Source code download:
http://icculus.org/physfs/downloads/physfs-1.1.1.tar.gz
Grabbing development branch from Subversion:
svn co svn://svn.icculus.org/physfs/trunk physfs
Notable changes in 1.1.1:
- New CMake-based build system. The autotools mess is gone, as are all
the specialized project files for various toolchains. We now maintain
one text file that describes the project, and use CMake
(http://www.cmake.org/) to generate real project files from there...it
produces standard Makefiles for most Unixes and BeOS, but also project
files for KDevelop, Xcode, Visual Studio 6/7/8, Watcom, Borland, and
other build tools on Windows and Mac OS X. If your platform or build
tool isn't supported, energy is better spent on enhancing CMake than
creating another project file for PhysicsFS. OS/2 still uses a batch
file to build for now, but everything else is either using CMake or will
be dropped.
- New archiver: lzma support (7zip archives), thanks to Dennis Schridde.
- Unicode support! All PhysicsFS APIs that deal with strings now expect
them to be UTF-8 encoded, and will convert behind the scenes as
appropriate, so eventually your UTF-8 encoded Japanese characters will
become 2-byte WCHAR strings when looking for filenames on a Windows NTFS
disc, etc. Windows will try to use the appropriate codepage on
Win95/98/ME, and use the actual Unicode entry points on NT/XP/Vista,
CFStrings on Mac OS X, etc. The platform layers in PhysicsFS for all
supported OSes are now Unicode clean, except OS/2 (to be considered).
There are new PhysicsFS APIs to provide conversion between some common
character encodings.
- New API: PHYSFS_isInit(), to determine if the library is ready for use
when you don't have access to the results of a previous PHYSFS_init() call.
- New API: PHYSFS_symbolicLinksPermitted(), to determine this state when
you don't control the calls to PHYSFS_permitSymbolicLinks().
- Symlinks are now supported on Windows Vista: PHYSFS_isSymbolicLink()
and PHYSFS_permitSymbolicLinks() work with the native filesystem as
expected in the new Windows version without losing binary compatibility
with older Windows releases.
- Public headers no longer use size_t, so they work without any system
headers pre-included.
- Internal mutexes are now recursive on all platforms, which means it's
now safe to call most PHYSFS_* functions from inside an enumeration
callback (including performing more enumerations from inside an
enumeration!)
- Added unarchiver program as an example application, which actually
does enumerations from inside enumerations. :)
- Added initial shot at a wxWidgets-based test program, to supersede
test_physfs.c ... still a work in progress.
- Mac OS classic support has been dropped. It could be readded if CMake
is enhanced to support CodeWarrior or MPW, and the code moves from
FSSpec to FSRef functions for Unicode support. Mac OS 8/9 support will
remain in the stable 1.0 branch, and Mac OS X is still, of course, fully
supported everywhere.
- MIX archiver has been dropped. It couldn't supply filenames (just hash
strings that represent filenames), and it had a tendency to take all
files that weren't accepted by other archivers. The source can be
retrieved from Subversion if someone wants/needs it.
- Mac OS X now has its own Carbon-based code, split out from unix.c,
which helps with functionality like Unicode and recursive mutexes...the
bits in posix.c are still used on OS X, though.
- OS/2 now builds with Innotek GCC and klibc instead of EMX (although
can probably still work with EMX).
- Most systems can make do with PHYSFS_init(NULL) now (but still should
have argv[0] for cases where they can't!). This includes Linux and
systems that present a Linux-like /proc filesystem with /proc/self/exe ...
- Compiles on BeOS again (was broken in 1.1.0).
- Added documentation for new, previously-undocumented APIs from 1.1.0.
- On GCC 4 and later, will build with -fvisibility=hidden, so the only
symbols exported from the library are the public APIs. This makes the
library smaller and faster when built as a shared library, not to
mention prevents namespace pollution.
- Reduced malloc pressure a little more (see __PHYSFS_smallAlloc() in
physfs_internal.h). More to come.
- Other bug fixes, cleanups, refactoring, and improvements. A LOT of
internal code has changed...you can check the Subversion repository
history for specific details.
Please report bugs! There are still more development branch features to
add, but the process of stabilizing the codebase should start
immediately. If there are features you want/need, please do mention
them...some may be on the TODO list already, but other requests are very
welcome.
Enjoy,
--ryan.
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