[physfs] Announcing PhysicsFS 2.0.0!

[Ryan C. Gordon]

Ladies and gentlemen, I present you PhysicsFS 2.0.

Developers using 1.0 are encouraged to upgrade to 2.0; the API is fully 
backwards compatible, but adds several new functions, features and 
fixes. The 1.0 branch will cease development with the 1.0.2 release, and 
2.0 will be the new stable branch.

   Source code download:
     http://icculus.org/physfs/downloads/physfs-2.0.0.tar.gz

   Grabbing the sources from Mercurial:
     hg clone -r release-2.0.0 http://hg.icculus.org/icculus/physfs

PhysicsFS 2.0 offers many improvements over the 1.0 branch.

- 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.

- Applications may now supply their own allocators for PhysicsFS to use 
internally. If you don't want to supply one, PhysicsFS uses a reasonable 
default for the platform (such as malloc() on Unix, or CoreFoundation 
APIs on Mac OS X).

- New API: PHYSFS_mount(). This supercedes PHYSFS_addToSearchPath(). 
This lets you put your archives at specific points in the interpolated 
file system. If you have an archive mounted to "/some/subdir" then it 
treats it as if every file in that archive is under the /some/subdir 
directory (so /path/x.txt will be accessible at 
/some/subdir/path/x.txt). Developers can still use 
PHYSFS_addToSearchPath() if source/binary compatibility with PhysicsFS 
1.0.x is important, and even mix and match calls with PHYSFS_mount().

- 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 and later: 
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.

- Improvements to support Cygwin, Mingw32, and MSYS.

- 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). Haiku is now a supported 
target platform as well.

- 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 Mercurial repository 
history for specific details.

Please report bugs! Discuss them here or post them in the bug tracker:

     http://bugzilla.icculus.org/

--ryan.