Re: Discuss-gnustep Digest, Vol 3, Issue 2

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Monday, February 3, 2003, at 06:38  pm, Jonathan Gapen wrote:

> > Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 04:37:10 -0600
> > From: Terry Glass <taglass75@bellsouth.net>
> > Subject: NSSocketPort broken in CVS?
> >
> > I rebuilt base and didn't see anything about NSSocketPort being
> > compiled.  Was it inadvertently left out of the makefile?
>
>       That is a negative.  I put it in CVS, but did not add it to the
> Makefile, as I have not tested whether it compiles on any system other
> than FreeBSD.
>       It contains only minimal functionality anyway; basically it's an
> object wrapper for a BSD socket.  You can use the initialization
> functions to create an object, then get the socket to initialize an
> NSFileHandle to read and write from it.  I figure it is useful for two
> reasons:  1) Insulates your code against the vagaries of the various 
> BSD
> socket implementations, and 2) automatically handles closing the socket
> when the object is deallocated.

The GNUstep NSFileHandle code already has stuff to do all that.

>       There was talk a few months ago about re-working the distributed
> objects system to use local communication (NSMessagePort) by default,
> and roll the TCP/IP functionality from GSTcpPort into the NSSocketPort
> class.  I'm in favor of the change.  (NSSocketPort is set up, though, 
> so
> that you can use any network protocol that supports reliable, data
> stream connections.  GSTcpPort needs some changes to do that.)
>      Further, I wonder if NSMessagePort could be implemented using 
> NSSocketPort on the local protocol family (PF_LOCAL), or NSMachPort on 
> systems that support Mach ports (Darwin, Hurd, NetBSD with COMPAT_MACH 
> and others)?

I'd really like to get time to do that ... I have a partially written 
class where
I'm trying to factor out all the code from NSFileHandle/GSFileHandle 
which
deals with various networking options, so I can make both the concrete
NSPort and NSFileHandle implementations use the same lowish-level
I/O facilities ... bsd sockets (tcp and unix domain), sysv streams, 
pipes etc.
SSL encryption and data compression too.

Unfortunately, I'm finding it hard to get time to work on it.