Re: monikers, gnome-vfs (again :-)

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:

> On 18 Dec 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > What I was proposing is to send a patch for problem 1 for the sake of
> > future extensibility.
> 
>         I seem to have fixed this already localy, it will appear shortly,
> so sending a patch should not now be neccessary; thanks for the
> suggestion.

OK. I would have just sent the patch but previously you seemed to
think this change was undesirable. Thanks for making the change
yourself.

> > >     The not knowing the prefixes problem is intractible with the
> > > current setup, without adding a special hook for this case which
> sounds
> > > ugly; it's possible there is a clean solution though.
> >
> > It's sort of a problem in general with things described by oaf and
> > things whose capabilities vary at runtime depending on other installed
> > software. I'm hoping there will be relatively few occasions where that
> > happens so we can suffer the few special cases, unless someone has a
> > good design for addressing this problem.
> 
>         Allow run-time, transient registration of oafinfo data with oaf ?

This is a useful thing for introspection type stuff, so I'd like to
add this feature.

But it's not so useful for activation, since you need to know the
relevant metadata before the component is active and running. Having
to activate a component in order to do a query to find out if you want
to activate it kind of misses the point. 

One possibility (although it's kind of complicated) is to have
separate super lightweight components that provide dynamic lists like
the set of schemes supported by gnome-vfs, or the set of mime types
supported by gdk-pixbuf, and to be able to reference such a component
as well as a literal mime type or scheme string. This would provide
sharing and some degree of cacheability, reducing the amount of
activation you have to do in order to do a simple query.

Higher level code like the gnome-vfs mime code or Monikers could make
activating these components and getting the lists transparent. I'm not
sure it's really worth the effort to do this though.

Regards,

Maciej