Development: wxFileSystem & wxUrl

There was a lengthy discussion on wx-dev a while back, see the archives here.

[edit] What Needs to Happen

A reworking of the wxFileSystem API and with write support added to handlers
wxUrl handling only url parsing
URI parsing
Somehow move the protocal work being done in wxUrl into some kind of seperate mechanism.
Allow enumeration of available protocols
Have API to query handler capabilities (read/write/enum/local-files-only/...)
Solve multiple handler registration problem (preferably using wxRTTI as I believe you proposed, provided we solve the problem with linkers optimizing static linkage, but we have to solve it for XRC2 anyway)
Get rid of wxFSFile ugliness
- There's a few ways this can be done:
  - Have wxFSFile Inherit a wxInputStream and wxOutputStream and just outdate the functions.
  - Create a new class.
  - Try to work with existing functionality, while maintaining backwards compatability, but no wxStream support and RTTI will be difficult to implement.
Use wxStreams
Enumerate files using intelligent API (read: wxDir; itegrate with wxDir?)
- Vadim says that wxDir should stay the way it is.
Handle files metadata

It has very fragile URIs parsing (and filename<->URI conversion that doesn't cover all legal cases)
Messy way of stacking protocols
- (file:foo.zip#zip:archiveFile.html), is HTML-centric (special support for HTML anchors)
You must create own wxFileSystem to access the data, so that it can keep track of its "virtual" current directory -- this should be fixed, wxFileSystem should become some wxVFS that is *stateless* (and wxVFSLocation would provide means to absolutize relative URIs)
- Stateful files enumeration
Too complicated access to data (create wxFSFile, obtain stream from it, delete wxFSFile object instead of "get stream for this URI")
No protection against adding same handler twice
- RTTI should fix this
(wishlist) No loadable handlers support and native VFS integration
- RTTI will take care of the first one
- Only Gnome & KDE have VFS to my knowledge - yet XP IIRC can open zip files natively, does it have one too? None on the mac side it seems.
Read-only