Re: Oaf names & file structure

[Mathieu Lacage <mathieu eazel com>]

Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com> writes:

> On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 05:50:01PM -0800, Mathieu Lacage wrote:
> > If you want gnumeric, it is because you want to do something with
> > it.  So, let's imagine you want to display a file through
> > gnumeric.  If you want to do this, you should not force gnumeric
> > but use teh default application/component which the user has
> > choosen to display spreadsheets. The gnome-vfs mime databse stores
> > such data.
> > 
> > So, I do not think this is a very good example.
> 
> This requires an ideal world in which all components are created
> equal.  There are always assumptions in a larger applications that
> eventually result in different behaviours.  I agree that if the goal
> was to display something that looks like a spreadsheet then any old
> implementation will do.  However, if the intention is the actually
> calculate something, we are far better off using the explicit
> calculation engine that the coordinating application is requesting.
> As someone that spends his daylight working hours doing fiddly
> spreadsheet calculations, I can promise that changing versions of
> calculators is something not taken lightly.  Gnumeric has more
> robust statistics calculations than MS Excel (tm).  God help us if
> someone installs a new copy of Office 13.25k which just happens to
> diddle the mime database on one machine in the compute farm.
> Tracking the miscalculation would take weeks.

hrm...

Well, I dunno but I cannot think of any other solution but to make users
think when they choose their default component in the mime capplet.

I am sorry to be so stubborn but I really am sad to see the whole purpose
of OAF go away because ppl use IIDs in their requests...


Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Lacage <mathieu eazel com>