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

Possible mentor

Emmanuel Stapf