Minor critique of one statement in this - 


On 13-12-2012, at 4:37 AM, H. Hirzel <hannes.hirzel at gmail.com> wrote:

> P.S. Here the citation of Marcus' post
> [snip]
> - to have a better used and therefore more bug free code base (see
> e.g. the FilePlugin fixes that had to be done)

I'd suggest a completely new file related plugin - or even split it up into several, possibly? - and leave the old one alone. It could be expensively confusing to have a plugin of the same name intended for a dramatically different system. Far easier to explain to some suffering user that they need to fetch a new version of FileSystemPlugin than FilePlugin but don't forget it has to be from this directory on this site and check this detail….

Whilst the subject is at the front of my mind, let's remember that there is no real need to have identical plugins and low-level image code for all platforms. There is no particular good in having a single class calling a plugin and that plugin having to do large amounts of platform specific mangling in order to conform. Consider the potential for class Blargh having proxies (or bridges, or subclasses, to taste, they can all work) BlarghForWindowsFAT32, BlarghForUnixZFS, BlarghForRISCOSADFS, BlarghForRISCOSNetFS, etc etc. You get to do complicated things in a language that is good for complicated things and pass calls down to simpler, platform/OS/filesystem specific, plugins.


tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: JSP: Jump on Sexy Programmer