[physfs] Multiple contexts in one process

[Ryan C. Gordon]

On 5/14/18 11:55 PM, Sherief Farouk wrote:
> I made a small proof-of-concept implementation of this idea, which can 
> be found at https://bitbucket.org/sherief/physfs-ng-public - keep in 
> mind that it is both incomplete and incorrect in some aspects (no 
> per-context error code support for example) but for now it allows you to 
> have multiple contexts, each with their own search path(s) and write 
> path without (hopefully) breaking API backwards compatibility. For my 
> use case there is certainly value in having multiple components have 
> isolated PhysFS contexts inside a single process. Is there wider 
> interest in this feature? If so, it'd be nice to have it added to a 
> future version of PhysFS and maintained going forward - if not, I can 
> just keep a private fork and implement it there.

This isn't something I'm personally interested in adding to PhysicsFS at 
the moment, but if it's interesting to you, definitely keep working on 
it and see where it takes you!

If I were breaking backwards compatibility at some point, it might be 
nice to dump all the global state, and have the equivalent of 
PHYSFS_init() just return a handle/pointer that is used with every API 
call, which would solve this same problem (each handle would be a 
"context") but then again, the global state makes the public API more 
simple. I don't know. I'd have to think on it more.

--ryan.