QGIS » QGIS Application

More details on vsipreload and why it would be a good thing to have it inside QGIS

http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/gdal-dev-vsipreload-enabling-VSI-Virtual-File-API-for-regular-I-O-td5055811.html

From gdal NEWS:

Add vsipreload.cpp that can be compiled as a shared library that can be LD_PRELOAD'ed as an overload of libc to enable VSI Virtual FILE API to be used with binaries using regular libc for I/O

Many formats (e.g. netcdf) cannot be read inside .zip files without this

basically, it could be implemented this way (at least in linux):

- create a shared lib vsipreload.so and install it with other qgis libs (e.g. /usr/lib/)

this is how it is done inside gdal, should be done in another manner in qgis
g++ -Wall -fPIC port/vsipreload.cpp -shared -o vsipreload.so -Iport -L. -L.libs -lgdal

- modify qgis startup script so that qgis is started like this

LD_PRELOAD=vsipreload.so qgis.bin

I am not sure about licensing issues though, can we copy the port/vsipreload.cpp to qgis source legally? Looks ok to me.