[CF-Devel] Plea

[Mark Wedel]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Yann Chachkoff wrote:

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      Maybe. What is important IMO is that they can all access to the picture
     
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      repository in a transparent way. That should not be difficult to achieve.
     
     
 Correct.  The real thing here is ease of end user.  I know of several
commercial apps that have seperate setup programs that handle base config
of graphics and sound and what not.

 Presuming the gtk/gnome/x11 client all use the same interface (which
I'm sure they do), it may very well be easier to write a front end
program or script that does the work, so that that doesn't need to get
put into all the clients (this may then also be usuable for the SDL
client).

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      IMO the installation should be automated. For example, you download a "picture
     
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      package" (an tar.gz archive for example) into a gfx/ subdir. The new picture
     
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      set should then be available into the client.
     
     
 I'm not too concerned about this.  If the directions amount to:
1) Download image file(s) you want
2) 'cd ~/.crossfire/gfx'
3) gtar xvfz /path/to/downloaded file

 I would hope users can handle that.  If they can handle download and
install of the client, they should be able to do that.

 But it might be nice to have a script (perl/tcl/tk/sh/whatever) that does
something like ftps the manifest from the image ftp server, checks
what the user has download (ie, what sets they like), compares that to the
manifest on the ftp server to see if there are newer ones do download,
download those, and put them in the gfx directory.  Thats a bit more work,
but not terrible.

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      Mmm... I correct what I said before.
     
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      I do not suggest to develop a brand new server protocol - we could use a
     
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      standard FTP server with some "index" files that the client reads to know what
     
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      to find and where.
     
     
 In this case, I would really like to see external ftp programs used,
so the potential of ftp proxies or other issues can be avoided (as well
as a lot simpler code).

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      Again, I suggest using an FTP server with a catalog of available pictures with
     
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      version informations, location, etc. That file could be a simple text file.
     
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      The client downloads it and browse it to determine what has changed since last
     
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      time; then, using those informations, it can download only what is really
     
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      needed. A front-end program should be available either as a separate program
     
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      or inside the client itself.
     
     
 I'd rather this be a seperate program, which can get launched from the
client for the reasons described above.