Re: Gnome.Vfs to index archives

[Joe Shaw <joeshaw novell com>]

Hi,

On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 23:34 -0400, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> While writing a decompression Lib from scratch in C# would no doubt be
> a pain, and just calling system commands to decompress files isn't the
> best method, but what about utilizing the Gnome.Vfs class.

gnome-vfs's archive support has always been more theoretical than
functional.  Nothing I am aware of makes use of it, and frankly it
probably just doesn't work.

> I would be more than willing to learn the basics of C# and get a rough
> class working, but I just wanted to check and see if this possibility
> had already been considered, and if so what drawbacks does this method
> present etc.

You're probably much better off writing your own filter which does the
decompression itself.  It's definitely not ideal, but you don't have to
write it all yourself.  Mono ships an assembly called SharpZipLib, which
has support for all the archive types.

There is some code which uses ths in Util/Archive.cs, but it's not being
used by anything at this point and would need some adaptation.  Also,
OpenOffice files are zip files and so the OO filter uses it to get at
the contents.  You can also take a look at how it does things.

Joe