EPI-LI-0004
Title
Library discovery
One line summary
Compile directly libraries from the web
Status
Not started
Description
Instead of having a location which is a path to a project configuration file on your local hard drivem you have a path to a URL (either ftp or http). Then the compiler reads the configuration file and install all the needed files on the local machine in a user defined directory (for caching purpose). Once it is done the compilation proceeds as usual.
This will result into the following advantages:
- Easy to install libraries: no complicated setup, no environment variable required
- If library comes with some C code, C code gets automatically compiled.
- Track dependency automatically
- Update to new version of library when available.
It could also reuse EPI-LI-0005 for compressing/decompressing libraries so that it is more efficent.
Skills needed
Some networking knowledge.
Difficulty
Medium
Benefits
Get to learn more about Eiffel and its methodology. Improve its knowledge of networking facilities.
For the community, it would make it much easier to reuse and distribute Eiffel libraries. It would be like creating the equivalent of CPAN for Eiffel.
Licensing
GPLv2
Documentation
For the internals, http://dev.eiffel.com. For user documentations http://docs.eiffel.com.
Submitter
Eiffel Software