OpenOffice io vs. bonobo-storage (was: underlying politics)

[Michael Hoennig "(mi)" <mi sun com>]

Hi Dietmar,

> Many thanks for this hint. I have just looked at the ::io interface, but
> cant find anything interesting. I think we already have a nicer interface 
> in bonobo. Please tell me what you are missing in the current bonobo IO 
> interface.

In general: I was not speaking particularly about OpenOffice's IO 
interfaces, just that this is an area where we only need one 
specification. Of cause, in every detail we have to check advantages and 
disadvantages of both specifications - plus probably Mozilla's specs. I 
want Mozilla to be in that boat.

I know there are some redesigns ongoing in bonobo-storage.idl. But I 
haven't followed that discussion in detail yet. So I simply take today 
top level version of that idl to comment.

Interface Stream covers multiple aspects, but an interface should only 
cover a single aspect. If not, it reduces reuseability. The aspects 
covered are reading, writing, seeking and truncating. Additionally, 
having the copy_to method in this interfaces makes it harder to use 
helper classes for that.

We have multiple interfaces for this purpose: XInputStream, 
XOutputStream, XSeekable and for the copying XConnectable is what is most 
similar. Additionally our XInputStream has a method "available" to check 
if there is currently more data available which is different from EOF. 
Oh, btw: our XStream is deadly deprecated. It's just not marked as that, 
I'll do so immediately.

The more, the OpenOffice API has a dozen more interfaces specified in 
this module, for streaming data types and objects and some other stuff 
related to io. What OpenOffice does not have, is a Storage interface. 
Here I would take your interface more or less as is (despite the naming 
convention).

Probably this gives you some idea of what I mean by migration.

	Michael


BTW: Isn't it annoying to take care for the leading asterixes when 
changing documentation? And documentation has to be much more elaborate.