Re: A question about naming components.

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Martin,

On Tue, 2002-05-14 at 13:29, Martin Sevior wrote:
> 	Pretty soon we'll release an AbiWord 1.0.2 rpm which supports the
> interfaces: bonobo
> control/embeddable/zoomable/printable/property
> bag/persist/persist stream/ persist file. 

	Great :-) that's really good.

> It will be immediately embeddable in evolution and gnumeric. However I
> have a question about naming the component. We've named our component
>
>   <oaf_server
> 	      iid="OAFIID:GNOME_AbiWord_Control"
> 	      type="factory"
> 	      location="OAFIID:GNOME_AbiWord_ControlFactory">

	I'll reserve the GNOME_AbiWord namespace against your name in
libbonobo/doc/NAMESPACE. If you read the bonobo FAQ it talks about this
issue ( bonobo/doc/FAQ ).

> However I noticed that many other components have long, randomly
> generated text strings after their names. What is the purpose of
> those?

	They were intended to garentee uniqueness, but we went with a
structured namespace instead in the end.

>  Should we do the same? If we release 1.0.3 with a different string 
> of random characters will it still work with evolution/gnumeric?

	Just don't go there :-) 

> More-over if a random hacker wants to use the AbiWord component in her
> application will she have to get the long random string of characters
> exactly correct when asking for the AbiWord control?

	Yes - that's the problem.

	I would also encourage you to use the GNOME_AbiWord namespace for your
.oaf filename, and also any .xml User interface description files for
menu merging etc. as this garentees a lack of conflicts.

	HTH,

		Michael.

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