[Open Office] Generic desktop adapter (proposal & prototype)

[michael meeks]

On Tue, 2005-11-29 at 19:26 +0100, Éric Bischoff wrote:
> Correct me if I am wrong, but what you propose is nothing less than merging 
> the kio and the vfs ?

	Right :-) in fact this is not such a difficult task IMHO.

> If true : wow. While this seems highly desirable, this might be a programmer's 
> nightmare. For example, KDE uses Qt's signals and slots to do asynchronous 
> I/O while Gnome uses callbacks (if I am not wrong). And there is a lot, lot 
> of existing code.

	Sure - that's easy enough to sort out; eg. the Gnome VFS is not only
thread safe but provides async callbacks that could easily be mapped to
signals / slots.

> That would be an exciting project, but much ahead of us OpenOffice.org 
> developpers (*). And highly "political", of course.

	I guess; I imagine even if the result was something that looked like
gnome-vfs + a Qt wrapper for it - it would be necessary to re-write
completely from scratch, duplicating all the common functionality
provided by glib to remove that dependency: the joys of compromise ;-) -
of course, in the end this tends towards a situation way less efficient
than just linking glib everywhere - since D/BUS already duplicates a
bunch of that code itself - duplicating it again in every shared project
tends to lead to the very bloat & madness people want to avoid but ...
c'est la vie ;-)

	Either way the more interesting problems a shared vfs solves are
standardisation, consistent URI parsing/mangling across the system, more
re-use in other projects (eg. OO.o), shared maintainership etc.

	IMHO it's an excellent idea to create a new shared VFS - with a feature
super-set of what exists but - generating rational compromise in Free
software communities is excessively difficult often :-)

	My 2 cents,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot