Re: mime -> server_id mappings

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Matthew Loper wrote:

> I'm not happy with this in the .gnorba files:
> 
> // in text-plain.gnorba
> repo_id=IDL:BonoboObject/text-plain:1.0 IDL:GNOME/BonoboObject:1.0
>         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> // in image-x-png.gnorba
> repo_id=IDL:BonoboObject/image-x-png:1.0 IDL:GNOME/BonoboObject:1.0
>         ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> 
> Those underlined items have nothing to do with a BonoboObject, and aren't
> really spelled out as interfaces anywhere!
> 
> Those underlined items are meant to say, "As an object, I can hydrate with
> the text-plain or image-x-png mime-types, via the PersistStream interface
> specifically."  But including "IDL:BonoboObject/text-plain:1.0" among the
> list of interfaces won't make that connection clear to programmers.

Agreed, but not for the same reasons. I think this was a miggiehack excuse
for not coding separate .bonobo db access routines.

> My solution is to change the above to the following:
> 
> repo_id=IDL:GNOME/PersistStream/text-plain:1.0 IDL:GNOME/BonoboObject:1.0
> // and. . .
> repo_id=IDL:GNOME/PersistStream/image-x-png:1.0 IDL:GNOME/BonoboObject:1.0
> 
> (IDL:GNOME/PersistStream:1.0 could be added to either of the above)

Hmm, this may solve your objections to Miguel's solution, but it's still
totally wrong IMHO. In this situations, the data type that a server
handles has nothing to do with which CORBA interfaces it exports, so
trying to overload the list of repo ID's to serve a totally different
purpose is bad. The repo_id field in a .goad/.gnorba file lists the CORBA
interfaces that a given server supports (in lieu of an IR for now) - it
should serve just that one need.

Someone needs to build a proper bonobo-objectregistry that will read
.bonobo files and do the figuring out of which goad ID to activate for a
given MIME type.

(If you want to cut & paste code into bonobo, there are many worse places
to start than gmf/libgmf/gmf-filterregistry.[ch] :-)
-- Elliot
"We're sorry, we didn't know it was supposed to be invisible."
	- Sign carried outside US embassy.