Re: summary of the previous thread on oaf IIDs (as I remember it)

[Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com>]

Hi Maciej,

On 19 Nov 2000, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> I can think of a real easy way to implement this, which is to add a
> starts_with operator to OAF. Then you can do a query like:
> 
> "iid.starts_with('OAFIID:gnome_eog_image:')"
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?

        Yes; this sounds reasonable as a half way measure. However, I
would suggest that we should recommend namespacing the first part of
the name in this case, otherwise we end up with all the problems of
naming conflict that you point out. So we would have:

        "iid.starts_with('OAFIID:GNOME/Eog/ImageFactory')"

> I would still prefer that people use the full IID, or, better yet, as
> Mathieu so eloquently argued, not hardcode IIDs at all

        IIDs are already hardcoded in both the factory and the oafinfo
files, thus causing painful duplication and annoyance, but at least
the starts_with helps to ease the pain for component users rather than
implementors.

> I do recognize that there are times you do want to hardcode IIDs - for
> instance, it would be silly for the EOG program to query for an
> arbitrary component to handle EOG images.
  
        Excellent.
  
> So I agree to make this case easier

        Many thanks for this.
 
        Regards,
  
                Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot