Re: [gnome-db] more refactoring

[Andrew Hill <andru treshna com>]

Hey Rodrigo, as someone that uses libgda in yet another project I 
support this idea.
I have at the moment done lots of cunning things in makefiles and dynmic 
loading of
shared libraries to allow swtiching between native database support or 
gnome-db.
So this makes life a lot easier.

I've never seen glib as a bad dependence.  Its widely supported on 
different platforms
and its very design is to be cross plateform tool, not something that 
hampers dependences.


> Hi
>
> In the last weeks, I've been talking with many people about libgda usage
> in other projects, and, so far, one of the big concerns I've been told
> about is its long list of dependencies, specially the CORBA ones (ORBit,
> OAF, Bonobo). So, I've been thinking about making (yet) another
> structural change, but which won't affect at all neither the current API
> nor the apps that use it.
>
> I'm talking about removing the CORBA layer, and replace it with a simple
> plugin system, where providers will just be shared libraries that are
> loaded via GModule API (in Glib). Doing this will:
>
> * reduce our dependencies to glib and gnome-xml, both available on many
> platforms. Of course, plugins will still depend on the specific DBMS
> libs, but as they will be dynamically loaded, there is no need to link
> libgda against the DBMS libs.
>
> * make it usable for many projects, specially the ones I am concerned
> about: Mono (both in linux and in windows) and GNOME Office, where
> having libgda depend on CORBA stuff makes it hard to use for many of the
> GO apps (Abiword, which is cross-platform, for instance).
>
> * simplify things a lot, both in the code, in the performance, and in
> the possibility of compiling/using it in many GNOME-unrelated platforms
> (Windows, Mac OS, embedded devices, etc) 
>
> * we won't lose the CORBA ability of distributing libgda apps, since we
> can easily wrap all the architecture (a tiny library) into a CORBA
> server, and have it available for people wanting to use the CORBA stuff
> of libgda.
>
> * we won't have API problems, since in the GNOME 2 version, all CORBA
> stuff is hidden in libgda internals, so this change will mean just
> replacing the internals with just a few API changes. Also, providers'
> code will need just a few (or none at all) changes.
>
> So, how does this sound? Any concern/suggestion/opinion?
>
> cheers