[KCP] Thoughts on adding system changes and refactoring ChangeSet

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Jun 24 19:13:58 UTC 2003


On Tue, 24 Jun 2003, Stephen Pair wrote:

> As an example, the browser might poll the currently selected class and
> category for a list of methods to display in the right most list box, it
> would do this often enough that a change to this list elsewhere would be
> reflected in the browser in a timely manner.  If the entire browser or
> the affected portions of the browser (method list and source pane) are
> obscurred by other morphs, then the browser need not poll for that list
> of methods.

Stephen,

This might work for browsers, but the vast majority of the clients of the
notification system (ChangeSet, packaging and versioning systems, analysis
tools, other dev tools like MessageLists)  won't work (or will be
extremely slow) in a polling system.  Polling only works when the set of
methods you are looking at happens to be well indexed (eg, all the methods
in a certain category of a certain class).  Most sets of methods a tool is
interested in (eg, all the methods that have changed recently, or all the
methods that send #foo) require linear search to discover.  You could add
more indices, of course, but maintaining them requires a notification
system...

Avi



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