Remove Boost dependency

[Narann]

Some downstream devs would like to remove the boost dependency from GlideHQ. This ticket has been created to follow this.

[littleguy77]

@Narann @twinaphex @richard42

So I started looking at this last night. You probably noticed, boost is only being used for its filesystem library, for just a handful of features:

• concatenate paths boost::filesystem::wpath operator /=
• determine if a file exists boost::filesystem::exists(...)
• create directory boost::filesystem::create_directory(...)
• iterate over files in a directory boost::filesystem::directory_iterator

Easy enough to replace, just pluck the operating system abstraction layer files (osal_files.h, osal_files_unix.c, osal_files_win32.c) from some of the other mupen64plus plugins.

Except for one complexity: GlideHQ supports unicode filenames. This is why boost was used in the first place:

  /* NOTE: I could use the boost::wdirectory_iterator and boost::wpath
   * to resolve UNICODE file names and paths. But then, _wfopen() is
   * required to get the file descriptor for MS Windows to pass into
   * libpng, which is incompatible with Win9x. Win9x's fopen() cannot
   * handle UNICODE names. UNICODE capable boost::filesystem is available
   * with Boost1.34.1 built with VC8.0 (bjam --toolset=msvc-8.0 stage).
   *
   * RULE OF THUMB: NEVER save texture packs in NON-ASCII names!!
   */

_Do we really need to support this feature?_

Do we get user complaints about mupen64plus-video-rice's lack of unicode support?

[Narann]

Good catch! I think this has been wrote before the mupen64plus port. I don't know if mupen64plus support unicode. I think @richard42 has a better advise about this but as you point, rice doesn't seems to have unicode support.

[richard42]

Personally I don't like Boost, so I'm happy to see it removed from GlideHQ. And I think all the other filesystem code in Mupen64Plus is not unicode-compatible, so it's not much of a loss to lose this 'feature' here too.

[littleguy77]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll remove the boost dependency and unicode support and try to get a PR out soon.

[mrfixit2001]

Thanks for the feedback. I'll remove the boost dependency and unicode support and try to get a PR out soon.

This is the only reason boost is needed on my distro... and one of them needs to go...

[richard42]

Just for GlideHQ? It shouldn't be that hard to remove it.

[mrfixit2001]

We are coming up on 8 years for this one haha hopefully the dependency on boost can be removed from this core eventually :)