2.0 wishlist...

[Ryan C. Gordon]

This is my unofficial wishlist for PhysicsFS 2.0. Comments, corrections,
and additions are very welcome.

- Move to Subversion from CVS. This is overdue.

- Add "mount points":

Right now, you create a search path. This path might have x.zip with
y.txt in it, so you can open "/y.txt" and get it. This causes problems
for, say, a downloadable game mod, since each mod can interfere and
override other mods, or the base data files. It'd be nicer if you could
create virtual directories to sandbox various archives, or at least keep
them sanely ordered...so you might open "/mods/ArticCombat/y.txt"
instead. The existing APIs will continue to work (it'll be like mounting
an archive at "/"), but this will solve a lot of problems people have
been having with physfs working to their needs.

- Expose the archiver registration mechanism to the outside world, so
you can optionally plug in support for a format at runtime. Relatively
easy to do, I think, would clean up the guts of physfs a little

- Reduce malloc() pressure. We allocate way too much small and temporary
shit that is better suited for alloca().

- Set up a mechanism for file enumeration that employs a callback into
the application to avoid allocating a throwaway list when possible.

- Allow the application to provide allocation services (with the default
to call malloc() directly from physfs). This is extremely useful for,
say, a PalmOS port.

- Find some way to relax or remove the security model so apps can have
roughly the same codepath for the game itself and external tools. I
think this probably needs a little more discussion.

- Probably other stuff. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with how 1.0 turned
out, and really just want to do some minor tweaking and enhancement to
it.

--ryan.