Re: GConverter commited

[Christian Dywan <christian lanedo com>]

Am Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:16:19 +0100
schrieb 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.

I have to wonder how significant the overhead can be, if you consider
the huge amount of modules in GVfs which come in one big package. ;)

Just my 2 cents,
    Christian