Packages (was: Re: DVS Roadmap)

Ned Konz ned at bike-nomad.com
Fri Nov 15 15:49:34 UTC 2002


On Friday 15 November 2002 12:22 am, danielv at netvision.net.il wrote:
> Objections, comments? If we agree about the convention itself, we
> can talk about having PackageInfos in the image, and what other
> tools might benefit from being based on them.

I'm actually using them right now. AFAICT there are two ways to use 
them:

* make a subclass of PackageInfo for your package
* make an instance of PackageInfo for your package

For some things (heavyweight packages), the subclassing seems to work 
fine. They give me a place to put:

* preamble/postscript texts (though in methods that return strings, 
which is a bit awkward)
* naming conventions (if I want to have a different external name for 
the files, or a shorter prefix)

They also give me something to enable patch-only sets with DVS (that 
is, I have patches that have nothing but one PackageInfo subclass and 
some methods in other categories).

I am a bit concerned with losing loose PackageInfo instances; we'd 
have to enable registration from ChangeSets, for instance, for a 
complete solution (i.e. have the CS fileout include a registration of 
a PackageInfo).

There's also a namespace problem. 3.3a had a system that had a more 
hierarchical namespace, with names like:

People-nk-Something

and

Projects-Connectors-Whatever

There's a temptation using DVS to use shorter *prefixes, which may 
lead to collision. Maybe making the Browser's method category display 
use color instead of prefixes (with bubble help to show the entire 
category name) would help here, as it could reduce the temptation to 
use short *prefixes.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE




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