Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Configuring Directory Opus for Fun and Profit
Innuendo:
Check out the various Downloads / Tutorials areas on the Opus forums for people's shared configs, advice, etc. Lots of good stuff there. There's also a very long & detailed customization tutorial soon to be posted by one of the forum members, who let me see a draft copy recently, so keep an eye out for that.-Nudel (January 03, 2012, 06:46 PM)
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That member has also let me see a draft copy & I've already sent over my feedback. (He even implemented some of it.)
I think there's some misunderstanding there. :)
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Not a misunderstanding...a typo. I meant to say implement support for archive formats *other* than ZIP and RAR. Oops. :-[
As for RAR, Opus has had a RAR archive plugin since seven or eight years ago.
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The version of DOpus I tested would open RAR archives, but open them outside of the lister. It was very awkward. However...now Mr. Potter has implemented proper support for RAR and nearly every other archive format known to man....and very happy I am. Happy enough I bought a license immediately upon finding out how well this feature was implemented.
It's possible I've forgotten a very old statement but I don't think anyone ever insisted that archive plugins would not be written, for any filetype. Adding the archive/VFS plugin API back in 2004 (or whenever it was) would've been pretty pointless if the aim was to never write any plugins for it. :)
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I didn't mean to say the aim was never to have plugins ever wrote for it. I was referring to an email exchange I had with Dr. Perry when DOpus 8 had been released. I had stated that it would be advantageous for plugins for other archive formats be written & it'd be a great boon to the program. His reply was that GPSoft was not going to write any such plugins and that they prefer to leave such things to the community to write. I am glad they saw the error of their ways.
As to all that you say about WinRAR/RAR, with the way RAR Labs has implemented their licensing, it was a very smart way for the file manager authors to add support to their programs...and the way Mr. Potter has implementing support for creating RAR archives when WinRAR is installed is nothing short of brilliant.
Nudel:
That member has also let me see a draft copy & I've already sent over my feedback. (He even implemented some of it.)-Innuendo (January 03, 2012, 09:50 PM)
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Ah, cool. You are one step ahead of me. :)
Not a misunderstanding...a typo. I meant to say implement support for archive formats *other* than ZIP and RAR. Oops. :-[
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Ah, fair enough. It makes sense now.
Yeah, the plan back when Opus 8 came out was to provide a plugin API and a sample RAR plugin and leave it to the community to create plugins for other formats. (Keeping in mind that 7z wasn't that popular back then, and there wasn't a lot of demand for it or any other archive format. Zip and RAR were the main ones. A few people wanted other formats but, at the time, not so many that it seemed like the right priority for GPSoft themselves to work on it, especially when -- as the theory went -- other people could write them and leave GPSoft to work on the stuff that only they could work on.)
Problem was, only one person tried to write such a plugin and they didn't get very far. Archive plugins are pretty complicated to write (especially with formats like 7z where solid archives do not allow you to access the files in any order, or .tar.gz where you've got an archive in an archive) so it's not surprising, in hindsight, but it took a while to realise that nobody else was going to do it and we had to do it ourselves, during which time the demand for 7z also increased as the format became more popular.
I say "us"... What happened is I quit my job (which was unrelated to Opus) and took a holiday to write the Archives plugin that eventually shipped with Opus 10. Somehow that holiday never stopped and I'm still working on Opus stuff today (and quite broke compared to before, but also getting to spend a lot more time with my cat). So, in a way, the Archives plugin was written by a member of the community... who became a member of the team while writing it. (Writing it took ages, too. It's one of the most complex things I've written, even though it's 'only' a wrapper around 7z.dll and a few other things. Making archives look like random-access filesystems, and doing it well, is quite complex. :))
While the main aim was 7z support, 7z.dll also provides loads of other archive formats, so with a bit of extra work we got a bunch of others as part of the deal. (A lot of extra work in some cases, e.g. so that you can modify a .tar.gz and Opus re-compresses the outer archive on-the-fly. And for the WinRAR stuff, too, of course, although in the end that only took a few days to write on top of the existing framework that the plugin had made for itself.)
We've thought about rolling a lot of the Archives plugin code into Opus itself and providing a simplified API for other archive plugins, which could take advantage of the framework that the plugin uses internally so that other developers could write their own archive plugins without re-doing that difficult work. There's probably no point, though. There aren't many archive formats left that we don't support now and if there is demand for one in the future then it'd be easier for us to add it to the Archives plugin instead than to provide and support another API. The existing VFS API is easy to use for plugins that talk to proper filesystems (i.e. not archives) so it doesn't really need simplifying for other VFS plugin types, and it'll probably stay as it is now (although we're happy to improve the API for plugin authors who write to us with issues).
The version of DOpus I tested would open RAR archives, but open them outside of the lister.
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FWIW, there's a FAQ about how to change that in earlier versions of Opus: http://resource.dopus.com/viewtopic.php?t=1366
oblivion:
Check out the various Downloads / Tutorials areas on the Opus forums for people's shared configs, advice, etc. Lots of good stuff there.
-Nudel (January 03, 2012, 06:46 PM)
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Part of the problem is, I think, knowing what you want to do/knowing what can be done.
It's difficult -- this isn't restricted to Opus, by the way, in case that's not obvious -- to work through the "I have this wonderful tool I can use for lots of things" jungle to "here's a specific thing I'd love to be able to do if I only knew how."
How many times have you watched people writing things down off their computer screen because they don't have the understanding that data, once it exists, can be copied elsewhere, printed, stored, emailed, whatever if you just have a certain bit of basic understanding? And a basic toolset, of course. :)
That's what I think the problem is with a lot of s/w like Opus. "It's a file manager." "Yeah, so? So's Explorer, and I got that already." "But it does this, and this, and this." "Huh? What use is THAT?" And so it goes on. You don't know what someone will find useful and they believe there's lots of useful stuff, if they but knew how to get at it.
I like Mouser's video tutorials for this stuff. Seeing somebody else do stuff with a bit of software is often what it takes to start your own thought processes off -- I can't use that, but there's this similar thing I'd like to be able to do, I bet it will if I just work with those features" and THEN you've got your answers -- but they're often all but unique to you.
An example in this thread; on the very rare occasions that I might want to pretend a folder with a CD's contents copied into it was a drive, for the sake of an install, I'd run up a command prompt and do a SUBST. (Yes, yes, I used to use CP/M too. ;) ) But the script would be useful for someone who (a) needed to do that sort of thing more often than once in a blue moon, and (b) didn't know about SUBST, let alone how to compose a command using it without Windows going "What on EARTH do you think you're going on about?" or whatever the relevant error message is. But backtracking from that; I'd have to know that it was possible to install CD-based software from something other than a CD and to think that might be a useful thing to do long before I started wondering if that might be something I could expedite with Opus.
I'm wittering, I think. It's harder to explain than I thought it'd be when I started writing. :)
Innuendo:
Problem was, only one person tried to write such a plugin and they didn't get very far. Archive plugins are pretty complicated to write (especially with formats like 7z where solid archives do not allow you to access the files in any order, or .tar.gz where you've got an archive in an archive) so it's not surprising, in hindsight, but it took a while to realise that nobody else was going to do it and we had to do it ourselves, during which time the demand for 7z also increased as the format became more popular.-Nudel (January 04, 2012, 07:06 AM)
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And that was the point I was trying to make way back when v8 was released. I had a spirited discussion with Dr. Perry regarding archive formats & how the limited support for ZIP & RAR were not going to be enough & that no one was going to take on the daunting task to write them. Dr. Perry just took awhile to come around to my way of thinking.
As an aside, though, my one minor victory back then was to get the GPSoft team to give up their custom file description format & go with the universal descript.ion way of doing things. I'm quite proud of that & feel DOpus is much better for it. It also gave me more respect for GPSoft as they took the suggestion of some schlub who wasn't even a paying customer. :)
I say "us"... What happened is I quit my job (which was unrelated to Opus) and took a holiday to write the Archives plugin that eventually shipped with Opus 10. Somehow that holiday never stopped and I'm still working on Opus stuff today (and quite broke compared to before, but also getting to spend a lot more time with my cat).
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And your tireless efforts to promote DOpus are appreciated. I'm not sure DOpus would be nearly successful as it is today if some driven fellow hadn't taken the time to make that DOpus discussion group on Yahoo! Groups all those years ago. Thanks, Leo!
Innuendo:
Part of the problem is, I think, knowing what you want to do/knowing what can be done.-oblivion (January 04, 2012, 08:22 AM)
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The way I see it is that the DOpus forums are an excellent source of reference and research. However, the trick when it comes to reference and research is that you have to know what you are looking for in order to find it.
I think a good analogy would be if one were looking for ideas and inspiration one could sit down with an encyclopedia or a reference textbook on a given subject, but the prospect of inspiration striking isn't likely to happen.
Think of this thread as "Stupid DOpus Tricks" on Letterman. ;)
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