[physfs] What are the real benefits of PhysFS ?

[Gregory Read]

Even if you are doing any cross-platform file i/o of any kind, you will
undoubtedly find it worthwhile.  There are a lot of little stupid things
that are just slightly different, especially between Windows and other OSes.

As a contributor to the Win32 port of PhysFS, believe me, you don't want to
have to deal with that mess if you don't have to.  PhysFS is really a simple
wrapper that will generally stay out of your way.  And being a mature
library, it has gone through a lot of testing and patching that make it
pretty stable to boot.

>From what I recall, it also puts a nice wrapper on things like where the
user's home folder is (regardless of OS).  That alone makes it worth using
as far as I'm concerned.

Greg

On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 4:23 PM, Daniel Aquino <mr.danielaquino at gmail.com>wrote:

> Well a simple wrapper  to convert path separators wouldn't be that hard ...
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>
> On Jul 16, 2009, at 1:12 PM, Alain Baeckeroot <
> alain.baeckeroot at laposte.net> wrote:
>
>  Le 16/07/2009 à 18:49, Daniel Aquino a écrit :
>>
>>>
>>> As I sit here I'm wondering what the benefits really are for putting
>>> in the work needed to get physfs into a game...
>>>
>>
>> as an humble contributor to a game (lincity-ng) physfs allow the
>> developpers
>> to easyly have a multi-OS game without problems, that's a very nice
>> toolbox
>> (even if windoz causes some trouble from time to time ;-) )
>>
>> If you don't need to acces to files in a simple way, i guess it is useless
>> :-)
>>
>> my 2 cents
>> Alain.
>>
>>
>>> I obviously know that I could provide updates as zip's that could
>>> easily be rolled back.
>>>
>>> The user can also easily override any file by adding his own to the
>>> write folder.
>>>
>>> You could specify paths to other zips/directories on the cli and it
>>> all just flows there is no need to point at 1 physical directory and
>>> then glue it all all together your self...
>>>
>>> But beyond that what is the benefits ?
>>>
>>> I was trying to reduce the complexity of rolling out version with
>>> multiple files... Previously I use to just push a new exe and it was
>>> simple to click on the exe you wanted to launch... Now that I have lua
>>> and other dll's in the project it's a multi file update that
>>> overwrites previous entries which looses the ability to pick the
>>> version you want to play in...   So I was figuring I could come up
>>> with a small boot strapper that would load up a bunch of locations
>>> using physfs, present a list of exe's to the end user, then extract it
>>> and launch it... Then the concept would be that the exe knows (perhaps
>>> based on date strings in the file names) which updates came previous
>>> to it self and doesn't load up any new ones...  This way updates could
>>> come in a zip and you can still play multiple versions...
>>>
>>> Any ideas?
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> physfs mailing list
>>> physfs at icculus.org
>>> http://icculus.org/mailman/listinfo/physfs
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>>
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