Subject: Re: PATCH: Compilation with LIBXML2 was broken
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Feb 05 2001 - 11:45:49 CST
>My argument is that we should pick a "winner" and decide
>that it suits our needs (size, speed, portability) and
>then work with that project to improve it or guarantee
>its existance. I'm not just advocating this for our XML
>parser, but also for things like our spelling system.
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you here, Thomas. See, AbiWord is
largely a collection of interfaces (as Mike will point out - some nicely
designed, and some poorly designed). One of them is a Spelling interface.
Another one is an XML file reading interface. I have considerable experience
with both of these.
The thing about interfaces is that they are by nature abstract. This means
that there can be 'n' implementations of any given interface. This is good,
because you get to choose the tools that work the best or comes standard on
any given platform. For instance the Spelling interface consists of four C
functions. It is trivial to implement a pspell, gnome-spell, or ispell
backend for this. And it is good to do so.
The XML importing code consists of any importer coding 2 functions that are
independent of the backend parser used. It can't get much simpler than that.
It is unfeasible that any of us could devote time to helping out the pspell,
aspell, ispell, expat, etc.. teams. We've got to pick technology that works.
And it turns out that there is often more than one product that fills the
niche. We have got to be dynamic and robust to survive.
Yes, coding to interfaces does add some complexity to the build system, but
IMO it is worth it.
Dom
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