Re: More namespacing woe ...

[Vladimir Vukicevic <vladimir helixcode com>]

On Thu, Nov 30, 2000 at 03:16:21PM -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com> writes:
> 
> > > What details? As I have already mentioned gnome-vfs uses "tar:" where
> > > the moniker in bonobo uses "untar:". Similarly for "gzip:"
> > > vs. "gunzip:". As far as I can tell, both use a syntax like
> > > 
> > > file://host/some/path/file.tar#tar:/path/inside/archive
> > 
> > I asked you to provide a detailed description.  If the spelling for
> > the `gzip:' token is different or the arguments are different that the
> > monikers it will not help to have them unified.
> 
> gzip works in the analogous way:
> 
> file://host/some/path/file.gz#gzip:

Well, this is confusing -- is the request to gzip it, or to gunzip it?
There isn't any way for the moniker to know; while you could argue
that you'd never want to gzip an already gzip'd stream, maybe you would --
i.e. an application that uses a moniker to get at a stream (of unknown
data), which it then compresses using the gzip moniker before sending
it off elsewhere. If the gzip moniker was called "gzip" for both cases,
it would end up uncompressing the original stream, causing reading from
the stream interface to give you uncompressed data, where you were
expecting gzip'd data. (Yes, gzipping data twice is a losing operation,
but if you're trying to make something general enough to not have any
knowledge of the input stream format, you'd end up wanting to compress it
anyway.) Note that this doesn't come up with the VFS case, since it only
supports gunzipping the data.

This type of confusion also doesn't happen with tar, since tar needs more info
to work with than just one stream, and can therefore figure out which action
is requested from more than just the moniker name.

        - Vlad