[Bf-committers] Preference file changes for Vista/Win7, network installations, and large domain deployments

[Harley Acheson]

Rob, 

I’m looking forward to looking at that code. 

The long-term goal of the file-loading code should be moving toward 
being “path-type agnostic”. Ideally, when users pass a resource location 
to Blender it should just do a FileExists and then a FileOpen, without 
worrying so much about what it looks like. It is all the sanity-checking in 
the current code that keeps unknown schemes from working like UNC, 
UNCW, and some types of POSIX-allowed paths. 

I’d love to see directory separators and parent directory identifiers defined, 
along with reserved characters and reserved names, and that code to 
become a lot less hard-coded. This type of clean-up has to happen if we 
want to support other cool things such as multi-byte characters in paths, 
needed for internationalization. 

The current issue at hand though, the simple usage of UNC, has largely been 
ignored because for the majority of users (and devs) it is not a problem to 
“just map a drive letter”. They are unaware of how big an issue this is on 
large network environments. 

What we need, you and I, is to find a dev with commit rights that has an 
interest in these issues... 


Regards, Harley Acheson 

Virtual Dogsbody 
Info Tech Department 
Shawnigan Lake School 



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Rob M" <rob.nospam at 4mation.co.uk> 
To: "bf-blender developers" <bf-committers at blender.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, 30 March, 2010 05:57:14 GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Preference file changes for Vista/Win7, network installations, and large domain deployments 

Hi, 

I've developed a patch for the UNC path problem which allow Blender to run 
from a UNC path. 

See 
http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=21836&group_id 
=9&atid=498 for details. 

Where would I look to add support for UNC paths in the open and save 
dialogs? 

Regards, 

Rob.