Re: Querying oaf of the interfaces a component implements ?

[Elliot Lee <sopwith redhat com>]

On Tue, 17 Oct 2000, Diego Sevilla Ruiz (dsevilla um es) wrote:

>     First intention of .oafinfo files are to list activation-specific
> interfaces, but, possibly in the future, this can also be an information
> repository for components.

But the point I tried to make was that OAF isn't an information repository
for introspection, it's activation information. OAF is not designed to
handle introspection well - the inheritance example I gave proves that.

> The IR does not know of different interfaces a component supports

That's because components are a Bonobo-specific thing, and the IR not.

CORBA 3.0 will have some sort of component thing with QI, so I suspect
they will change the IR to support that (or probably provide another
service to handle component introspection).

>     Anyway, in order for an application to select the "most adequate" component
> for its needs (through the OAF query language), the list in oafinfo should be
> as exhaustive as possible.

The list needs to be only as long as the number of interfaces that one
would want to query on for activation purposes. Bonobo::Unknown doesn't
fall into that category.

> > There are CORBA servers
> > out there with associated oafinfo files that don't inherit from
> > Bonobo::Unknown at all, and I can think of various kinds of Bonobo
> > object browsers that would want to leave those out, since they can't
> > be memory managed in a generic way.
> 
> I can't imagine a server/component in this way. Could you put an example of
> such a component?

"Just about every object impl in GNOME 1.2" comes to mind.

In any case, OAF is not going to have any ties to Bonobo, so assumptions
like this can't be made.

It's not a huge immediate problem if people choose to list all the
possible interfaces in the .oafinfo file, but I don't plan on doing it
myself, and I think the maintainance issues should give people pause
before listing all of them.

-- Elliot
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