[moved from cafe to libraries]
David Roundy
[darcs] contains a few bits of code that you might find useful, such as an interface to libcurl (for lazily reading files over http or ftp)
This sounds like it would be a valuable contribution all by itself. Could you make it available as a package with its own (copy of the) license? A very brief look at the existing network support suggests that Network/C_URL might be a good place to put it. A quick glance at libcurl documentation suggests that it is quite portable (unix and win32).
darcs is currently unix-only (counting MacOS X as unix). A port to windows would be a fair amount of work, but probably would mostly be straightforward (mostly dealing with slashes versus backslashes and getting libcurl to work under windows).
This reminds me of a library I have been wanting for a while: functions for manipulating filenames in a portable way. The main requirement is that you should be able to manipulate a filepath as though it was structured something like so: (Maybe [Directory], Maybe Filename, Maybe Suffix) For example, on a Unix system, /usr/lib/libcurl.so would be treated something like this: (Just ["/","usr","lib"], "libcurl", Just "so") There's an awful lot of code out there that assumes that you can find the suffix of a filename using dropWhile (/='.') or reverse . takeWhile (/='.') . reverse (try them on "/foo.bar/baz.exe" and "/foo.bar/baz") and there is (presumably) much reinvention of the wheel when people decide to implement functions which really work. Oh yes, I should say that 'darcs' sounds quite cool as well... -- Alastair Reid alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk Reid Consulting (UK) Limited http://www.reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk/alastair/