Re: RFP: CompoundStorage document

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Wed, Apr 10, 2002 at 10:18:03AM -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> 
> What I'd like to see is an abstract baseclass/interface which sensibly 
> represents a compound document. Some requirements would be:
> 
> 1) Easy mime-type identification (possibly achieved through points 2,3)
> 2) Creation of heirarchical structure (subfolders inside of the document)
> 3) Creation of streams within the root folder (/) and subfolders
> 4) "Normal" file operations, such as reading, writing, seeking, ...
> 
> This storage interface could be then implemented by things such as:
> 
> * Zip/JAR (ala OpenOffice)
> * OLE2
> * TGZ (ala KOffice)

Interesting, and probably useful, but I'd rather see us focus on the
low hanging fruit.  Each of these formats has its own idiosyncrasies
and crafting a good set of interfaces is non-trivial.  What does it
buy us, the ability to read biff records from a zip stream ??

As we work on wrappers for the various structured formats we should
definitely keep this goal in mind, but it does not seem worth the
effort at this time.