Re: gnome-vfs/GIOChannel for parsing

[Colin Walters <walters debian org>]

On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 11:11, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 03:34:00AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> > http://web.verbum.org/~walters/files/stream/index.html
> > 
> > Comments appreciated!
> 
> 1 major and 1 minor comment (you can guess which is which)
> 
> 1) gsf does support line by line parsing.  There is a wrapper for
>    that.  GsfInputTextLine

Fixed, thanks.

> 2) After your review of the available implementations you conclude
>    by saying that the obvious solution is to start from scratch and
>    implement the .Net stream interfaces.  

I'm not saying it's the "obvious" solution necessarily; nor am I saying
we should start "from scratch"; more below.

> Given the significant
>    amounts of work necessary to implement the various wrappers in
>    gsf I'm reticent to just toss it.  Beyond the lack of async i/o
>    what keeps gsf from being a viable basis for your work ?

I don't think we would be just tossing Gsf.  A new stream library would
probably share quite a lot in common with it; we could certainly reuse
ideas.  The big stumbling block that I see is Gsf's license.  If it were
possible to change to the LGPL, we could actually reuse code as well¹.

So it depends on what you mean by "viable basis".  One thing I should
say is that disregarding license issues, we could get to a good stream
library starting from pretty much point; we could GObject-ify
GIOChannel, break it into separate classes, and we'd be close.  Or we
could add more classes to Gsf.  Or we could break the stream stuff out
of GMime and refactor it a bit.  

In other words, there are multiple valid approaches here; I just feel
that the final form should look much like the C# stream API.

¹Incidentally, I feel uncomfortable to be in the position of advocating
that a piece of software should switch its license from the GPL to the
LGPL.  I have been a free software advocate for years now, and I
understand that having some library software available solely under the
GPL has helped promote free software.  However, in this case, there are
other competing environments which do have stream libraries, and it is
more likely that a program would switch to using a competing environment
rather than switch its license just to get access to a GNOME stream
library.  Thus the net effect on GNOME is negative, in my opinion.