On Nov 4, 2003, at 12:28 PM, ducasse wrote:

> Hi adam
>
> I had a brief look and this is a good start. I really think that we 
> need this kind of architectural
> support to avoid all the hardcoded mess. I have the impression that 
> the annotations are not really required we can simply use the class 
> initialize way for now as we do it in FileList.

Stef, you may well be able to come up with another solution than 
annotations, but class initialize methods are not it, for a very simple 
reason: you can only have one #initialize method per class.  This means 
that:

- I can't extend your package with a new registration without modifying 
one of your methods
- Two patches both adding registrations to the same package will always 
conflict
- The registrations cannot go in the same method category as related 
methods, especially if there are multiple kinds of registrations for 
the same class

And probably lots of other problems along the same lines.

We could of course allow multiple #initialize methods, but then we'd 
have to mark them as such, and how would we do that?  Well, we could 
use method annotations... ;)