Re: review of the Storage interface

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Dietmar Maurer <dietmar maurer-it com> writes:

> I don't like to freeze the current API because I think it is incomplete.

Lots of things in Bonobo could be even better than they are.

> But I have just reviewed my review and noted that most changes are simply
> extensions to the current API. We can make these changes without breaking
> anything else:

Even if these IDL changes really did not affect anything else, if we
don't have an API freeze soon it's going to be near impossible to
stabilize the apps that depend on Bonobo in time for the GNOME 1.4
target date - currently end of October. It's almost halfway through
September right now. Any serious change is doubtless going to
introduce new bugs, and once the change is in people will insist on
waiting to fix those bugs before shipping (rather than dropping the
change for ship).

However, it's not even true that we can make any of these changes
without affecting anything else. For instance, Nautilus has a server
that implements the Stream interface to use with Bonobo Controls and
Embeddables which we use to display content in Nautilus. We'd have to
make a lot of changes to that code to support all the things you want,
and it would be very difficult to test our changes, since no Bonobo
components out there use any of this functionality right now (since it
doesn't exist yet).

Do you think that all the changes you suggested are important enough
that we should delay shipping GNOME 1.4 for an unknown but possibly
quite long length of time to get them in, and even then risk shipping
a buggier GNOME 1.4? Are they also worth delaying GNOME 2.0, the
long-awaited and long-delayed development platform update, since many
people will not start working on GNOME 2.0 in earnest until GNOME 1.4
has shipped?

 - Maciej