Abstracting file access in TagLib

[Scott Wheeler]

On Friday 08 December 2006 0:05, William Pitcock wrote:
> Well, writing a stream class would be trivial; the main issue is that
> TagLib::File is mostly non-virtual. If TagLib::File were made virtual,
> then there would be little problems. The main issue at present is that
> TagLib::File isn't as abstractable enough to support a VFS layer. I'll
> write a patch to make it work in an abstractable manner soon, I suppose.

It's been on a tentative sometime-in-the-distant-future TODO for a (as of yet 
unplanned) TagLib 2.0, but I have no idea when that will happen.  This also 
isn't as easy as described:

TagLib::File being made virtual wouldn't do it because there are a lot of 
subclasses that derive from it.  Also adding virtual methods would break 
binary compatibility.

Also, many interesting streams don't provide random access, so the stream 
class would really need to have an API for its capabilities and all reading 
operations adjusted to account for those.

Really there needs to be a separate stream class which is passed in to the 
File constructor and is used for reading the metadata.

Of course, if you've got very specific requirements, you can naturally just 
built TagLib inside of your project with whatever changes that you need.

-Scott

-- 
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest 
person to fool. 
--Richard Feynman