Re: [sauron@charm.il.fontys.nl: Re: GNOME::Editor]

[Martijn van Beers <sauron charm il fontys nl>]

On Mon, Mar 15, 1999 at 12:26:40PM -0500, Matthew Loper wrote:

> First, FileBuffers. What relation is that interface supposed to have with
> baboon's "Storage" interfaces? It seems like there's some overlap.

Hmm, I wasn't aware of that one. FileBuffer was suppsed to be an abstraction
of the contents of a (text)file. So, when created, it'd read in the
contents of the file, and you'd get to do operations on that (Guess it
needs more operations though).

> FileBuffer seems more readable to me, but Storage more extensible...and
> wouldn't a filebuffer need some of the flags in Storage (being able to open
> a file readonly, for example)?
Hmm, yes.
Let's see what miguel has to say about Storage vs. FileBuffer first before
I go changing stuff :)

> On to searching and replacing, & regexps. An implementor could really botch
Sorry, but what's the exact meaning of 'botch'?

> regexps, right? Seems like that sets up a weak server-client contract. If
> joe schmoe tried to make an implementation, he could either botch regexps or
> return an "i don't support this function" exception. OTOH, if they were done
> right, it'd be really handy for the client. Basically, is there a basis for
> standardizing how that parameter is processed, and could an implementation
> say "no" if it had to?

Hmm, good point. I could add an exception that implementations that don't
have regexps can return. As to what regexps we support, we could just say
in the docs 'the regexp needs to conform to regex(7) (for example), right?

> Scrolling: does "scroll" scroll to a character, or a line? if you searched
> for a regexp, & found its location, you might want to scroll there--making
> "scroll" more sensible for scrolling to a character...?
In my mind it was scrolling to lines. The search function returns a long
param that contains the line of the first match.

Wouldn't scrolling to characters get you in trouble with the character count
you'd have to keep much faster than a line count? Or is there a better way
to specify the char to scroll to?

> What sort of servers are envisioned as implementing this interface? Could it
> allow the encapsulation of emacs as an editor? Could it encapsulate a simple
> (non-regexp supporting) editor? It doesn't seem to have much role in
Any text editor really, so yeah it should allow for non-regexp searches

> changing the window-position/size/embedding--are there any other interfaces
> that deal with that yet?

The View interface (bonobo/idl/bobject.idl) seems to be addressing (some of?)
this functionality


> I know, it's a lot of questions. But these interfaces are pretty important.

Don't apologize, questions are good. Formulating answers to questions
makes you think real well about what you've been doing. And yes, these
interfaces are very important, so don't stop till you're 100% satisfied :)

cya,
Martijn

-- 
Martijn van Beers
martijn@earthling.net