Re: [Libxmlplusplus-general] Status

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Murray Cumming wrote:

> You have a habit of ignoring replies to your questions and just
> restating your issues. I have said more than twice now that Nodes and
> Attributes are meant to be created and owned by other libxml++ objects,
> not directly. I have also said that I would like the API to show that.
> Enough.

Good, we agree. (the point was whether I considered the patch to be
self-contained or not; now we agree that it was not, and that further
API changes need to be done in order to make the API and its semantics
consistent).

> > And if the answer is 'the callee', I'd ask 'and how can I create an 
> > object that is not owned by the callee' ? Etc., you get the idea.
>
>
> First you would say Why you would want to do that.

Imagine you use this API to build an xml editor. When editing
a document, you may 'cut' stuff out, put it into a 'clipboard',
and 'paste' it at a later point somewhere else (whether it is
the same document or not).

This use case implies change-of-ownership semantics, somewhere.

> > and which should be added before the
> > API can be considered complete.
>
>
> APIs are never complete. APIs are stable at best.

I'd phrase it a bit less radically. As an API has (or can have)
a specific goal, such as to implement a given spec, it may (in
that respect) well be considered complete. If this sounds too
much like an imperative to you, use 'self-contained' instead.

Stefan