Convert kio_tar to use SubURLs

[David Faure]

On Tuesday 19 August 2003 21:04, Laurence Anderson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've attached a patch to kdebase to change over to using suburls for archives. 
> This means that before if you clicked on an archive you would get something 
> like:
> tar:/home/me/archive.tar/
> but now you get:
> file:/home/me/archive.tar#tar:/
> 
> This has various benefits, such as making the ioslave simpler, and will (soon) 
> support archives within archives, and archives from other protocols (like 
> floppy, mac & network protocols like ftp etc).

Sounds fine to me, *if* kio_tar still reads the file by itself when it's a local
archive, for performance reasons.

To implement "reading archives from other protocols" I guess you will
have another kioslave read from that protocol, and then send it to kio_tar,
like the initial kio_tar code did. This is the only way for remote protocols,
but it slowed down the local case a bit, please keep that as a special case.

Anyway, the reason I moved away from ftp://path/archive.tar/#tar:/
is that it has to download the *whole* archive, just to show its contents.
Then when the user decides "ok, this tgz looks fine, I'll download it",
he/she needs to download it all over again. On a slow connection, and/or
with a very big tar file, this is a real waste of time - and it behaves in
an unexpected way. I think it's better for the user to first download the
tar file and then look into it :)

Of course with faster protocols (e.g. floppy) it makes sense - I guess we're
back to using the settings from the configuration module, where the user
can say which protocols are generally fast and which ones are
generally slow for him/her.

-- 
David FAURE, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).