Are CORBA interfaces immutable?????

[Ron Jones <ronjones xnet com>]

----- Forwarded message from Martijn van Beers <martijn@earthling.net> -----

Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 18:51:25 +0200
From: Martijn van Beers <martijn@earthling.net>
To: Ron Jones <ronjones@xnet.com>
Cc: gnome-devel-list@gnome.org
Subject: Re: desktop-editor.idl
User-Agent: Mutt/1.2i
In-Reply-To: <20000626230502.A1205@ron.xnet.com>; from ronjones@xnet.com on Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:05:02PM -0500

On Mon, Jun 26, 2000 at 11:05:02PM -0500, Ron Jones wrote:
> Anyway, in the first release I just had some shell scripts to use the
> gnuclient program to automate (x)emacs. It would be slicker to use
> CORBA. My question is, what is the purpose of the interface in
> desktop-editor.idl? Do any editors implement it? Does any program call the
> interface?

Nothing implements it and nothing uses it. I really regret putting the
interface into gnome-libs when I did, since it really isn't adequate.

Please check out the gnomacs module. There's a new version of
Desktop::Editor, which is much more sensible in the idl/ directory,
and some unfinished bonobo wrappers for it in the lib/ directory.


Martijn


----- End forwarded message -----

The above exchange with Martijn happened several months ago on this list.
My impression was that interfaces, once "published" should be immutable,
like in COM. Otherwise, nobody could possibly reimplement a third party
interface, and the whole component model becomes fragile. Is this true?


Although Martijn claims that nothing uses or implements the interface,
this is not really true-- I had written an app and a server that uses and
implements Desktop::Editor as part of my source code browser. I feel I can
not release this until this issue is resolved, so this is not a purely
theoretical question.

Of course, for a truly open development project, there is some ambiguity 
about what "published" means. When does an interface get set in stone? I
would suggest that it is when it is included as part of a "stable" package.
Like gnome-libs. So if Martijn wants to redefine the interface, it should
be renamed (the module or the interface). Comments?

-- 
Ron
ronjones@xnet.com