Re: BonoboPreview initiative

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 10Dec2001 05:58PM (-0500), Alex Graveley wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, 2001-12-09 at 19:51, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> > Maybe we can look into enhancing the moniker interface to allow
> > applications to specify more than one required interface, and more
> > general attribute requirements.
> 
> Couldn't an UNO-like XService construct provide this?
> 

UNO's XService constructs are, as far as I can tell, roughly
isomorphic to OAF/b-a .server files, only expressed in IDL instead of
XML. Since we don't have UNO-style XServices, but do have
bonobo-activation, I'd lean towards using the latter for now. :-)

On the other hand; since bonobo-activation doesn't actually enforce
the contents of the repo_ids field, we could make up and use
conventionally named XServices right now, if we wanted to. For
example, things could list "Service:Bonobo/PreviewControl" in the
repo_ids field to express the fact that they provide the
"IDL:Bonobo/Control:1.0" interface and are suitable for preview use.

The problems with this approach are: (1) it seems kind of lame; (2)
only combinations of attributes that someone has already thought of
packaging can be expressed this way; and (3) there is no simple way to
prefer but not require something.

 - Maciej