Re: GConverter commited

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 04:22 -0500, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

> >> Anyway, since I was one of the people wanting this, I thought
> >> I'd share my first experiences with it.  I'm curious what other
> >> people would like to do about GConverters for other compression
> >> schemes.  The code is simple enough that I don't really mind
> >> keeping it in Yelp.  But if other people are doing this stuff,
> >> maybe we should talk about how to share code.
> >
> > Yeah, sharing things like this is good, but we don't want every app to
> > link to these libraries, and even gio plugins are not free (even when
> > not used) since we load them once to see what extension points they
> > support.
> 
> A gmodule-level caching scheme is in order...  Pango and gimp can use them too...

Yeah, that would probably be a good idea.

> > Its not a lot of code either, nor is it very complicated, so maybe cut
> > and paste is not such a horrible idea.
> 
> Well, we know where that would lead :).

I'm generally pro sharing code where it makes sense. But I'm also of the
opinion that there are cases where cut and pasteing code make sense.
Some people dismiss cut and paste as never being the right thing, but it
has several advantages that makes it sometimes useful. 

For instance, cut and pasting small amounts of code may be prefered to
adding large library dependencies (that are otherwise unused). It also
lets you untangle otherwise complex dependencies if things at different
layers in the system want to share a small bit of code.

However, in this particular case if we had the plugin system cache i
wouldn't mind having a basic uncompression GConverter that used magic
sniffing and modules for extending to new forms of compression.