Re: gnome-vfs/GIOChannel for parsing

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Feb 21, 2003 at 01:38:05PM -0500, Colin Walters wrote:
> On Fri, 2003-02-21 at 11:11, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > Given the significant
> >    amounts of work necessary to implement the various wrappers in
> >    gsf I'm reticent to just toss it.  Beyond the lack of async i/o
> >    what keeps gsf from being a viable basis for your work ?
> 
> I don't think we would be just tossing Gsf.  A new stream library would
> probably share quite a lot in common with it; we could certainly reuse
> ideas.  The big stumbling block that I see is Gsf's license.  If it were
> possible to change to the LGPL, we could actually reuse code as well??.

I chose GPL initialy due to abuses of libole2.  However, there have
been enough requests to relax that in recent weeks that the next
release will be LGPL, we have permission from all contributors at
this point and the only delay is me returning home.

No need to preach to the choir on this on, GNOME libraries are LGPL
for a good reason.  The GPL was ok when libgsf was a peripheral lib
used in a few office apps, but as it has matured and potentially
moved closer to the core LGPL makes more sense.  The same situation
came up with gnome-vfs and Richard / Bradley were ok with
relicensing of FSF code to LGPL for use there.

> In other words, there are multiple valid approaches here; I just feel
> that the final form should look much like the C# stream API.

I'll have alook at the C# interface next week to see what sorts of
adjustments you're looking for.  My design goal for gsf was to
simplify the lives of document centric apps, things that sucked in
blobs of structured content and streamed them back out.  As long as
your proposed interfaces handle those needs well it should be
feasible to meet in the middle.