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Important notice
The current Flux version released for download is 0.2.8. I'm working
on 0.3.0, which should be ready in a few days,
and the documentation you see here is for that version. Its API is vastly
different from 0.2.8's, setting the standard for all future releases.
As such, if you want to spare yourself some pain, don't use 0.2.8 in current
code. Thanks.
Pre-0.3.0 is in CVS, though, and you can get it with the following
sequence of directives:
> cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.styx.net:/cvs login
(Logging in to anonymous@cvs.styx.net)
CVS password: [blank password, just hit enter]
> cvs checkout flux
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Background
Even the smallest program operates on some kind of data, reading and writing
structured formats. Larger (though not necessarily large) programs can have
features like event loops, interprocess communications, buffers and logging
facilities.
Programming or piecing together this per-program framework can be a tedious
and time-consuming duplication of effort. You want to spend your time on
an application's unique features, not waste it on stuff like event loops
that can handle multi-socket communications and interface events without
one thing locking up the other.
That's what prompted the development of Flux. Certain tasks and problems were
popping up repeatedly in my work, and a generic remedy was in order. I
started gathering the often-used parts in a glue library, and called it, yes,
Flux. Also, some code which was strictly not glue, such as the IRC interface
layer, found its way into the lib.
Goals
- Simplify tasks. Provide simplified APIs to solve many common
programmatical problems, while keeping more advanced functions available
in API layers of increasing complexity.
- Homogenize interfaces. Unify operations which are
functionally similar and access exceptions through optional calls.
Example: network sockets and interprocess pipes, which are both streams
that can be buffered, waited for, etc. Here, the exceptions arise in
the way the streams are established.
- Homogenize platforms. Provide an environment that can be
used to access OS funcions whose implementations differ from system
to system, homogenously. Target platforms are as many Unix flavours
as possible and, through Cygwin,
Windows.
Assumptions
- Application developers mostly use a small subset of the
functionality in each full-blown library they link with. Example:
A few selected algorithms from a crypto library providing tons.
- Application developers want to link with as few libraries as
possible. Example: Largish GNOME-based applications (this isn't as
much work as you'd expect anymore, though, thanks to the gnome-config
script).
Thus, Flux tries to span quite a large set of applications without providing
extremely deep support for them. The idea is that you can survive using only
one scheme for symmetric crypto, one for asymmetric crypto, etc. In this
example, Flux will provide a few selected, well-known and strong algorithms -
namely, the ones most likely to be useful. (Crypto isn't scheduled for
implementation before 0.4.0, though). Read the plans
for more information.
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