Re: GNOME component versioning

[rms39 columbia edu (Russell Steinthal)]

On Fri, 16 Apr 1999 16:51:04 PDT, atmczen@ibm.net wrote:

>Hi Lee,
>
>On Thu, 15 Apr 1999 02:08:33 +0100
>Lee Mallabone <lee0@callnetuk.com> wrote:
>
>> I like the sound of this. As an additional idea, it might be nice 
if
>> _any_ gnome apps, (ie. non-'core' modules), could "register" 
themselves,
>> with whatever service provides a summary of version numbers.
>I second this.
>
>While the tool that I proposed can install all the components it
>builds, many users leave the installation to their preferred method.
>For this reason, I think it would be better for the component to have
>an interface, which register its own version information at run time.

Well, since gnome_init() already gets an application name and version string, we could probably retrofit this into gnome-libs without too much difficulty... 

All we would need is a small CORBA server which supports registration and unregistration of app/version pairs, a query function (perhaps both latest version installed and is a given version installed), and a dump function (return all registered app/version pairs).  Then we simply add a call to register() in gnome-init and write a simple client.  (We could add gnome-libs functions to wrap the CORBA if we wanted...)

I could probably whip something like that up in a day or so, since I have most of the CORBA code already written (for gnome-mailcheck).  The biggest drawback I see to that scheme, however, is that it will be difficult to "unregister" applications when they are upgraded; that is, we can rely on the fact that gnome_init() will register each new application the first time it is executed, but there's no good way to get rid of those entries.  (We could specify that any registration overwrites any existing registration for that app_name, but then we lose the ability to track multiple versions of the same application installed on the machine simultaneously.)

What do people think about that architecture?  Is it worth doing?

-Russell

-- 
Russell Steinthal
<rms39@columbia.edu>		Columbia College Class of 1999
<steintr@avnet.org>		System Administrator, AV-Network