Re: Are CORBA interfaces immutable?????

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> writes:

> Ron Jones <ronjones@xnet.com> writes: 
> > 
> > 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?
> > 
> 
> A valid issue we need to resolve.
> 
> It may be that the immutable thing is the name of the OAFIID (the name
> you use to obtain the interface from OAF). I don't remember the Gnorba
> equivalent. But you can't actually obtain an interface by the name
> "Desktop::Editor" with our new activation setup (OAF). Instead you
> obtain a name such as "OAFIID:Desktop::Editor:19991118" where the date
> would change if the interface did.
> 
> I'm not an expert, just a thought on the matter though.

As Elliot pointed out, OAFIIDs are Implementation IDs, not Interface
IDs. This is kind of confusing, admittedly.

Nontheless, I think we really need to figure out some kind of solution
for interface versioning. I think it's pretty clear a lot of
interfaces being written now will have to change in the future.

 - Maciej