Chris Barker wrote:
I originally came down on Has' side of this debate, but now think Bob has made the right choices, so I thought I'd add a couple comments.
First, I'm a little unclear on what exactly Has wants. Could you clarify?
Freedom, basically. It's easier to assemble a workflow by mixing and matching small, single-purpose components than to strip down a great big monolithic lump to get the pieces you want/need. If you're going to protect the end user from doing stupid things, that's great, but it should be done by the next layer up. Users who work at the top layer are protected; users who want/need to route around the 'dummy mode' restrictions can go in at the layer beneath. After all, it's the user's foot, and if they want to shoot holes in it in full knowledge of what they're doing then far be it for anyone or anything else to stand in their way.
For example, appscript currently takes this approach. The lower-level aem package provides a comprehensive wrapper around the AEM; appscript builds on this to provide a nice, safe, friendly-looking user interface for application scripting. Most folks'll just use appscript for all their application scripting, but geeks who need access to the full AEM, e.g. to send asynchronous events, can use aem. Prior to 0.6.0 appscript was a monolithic system, which meant you were SOOL if you wanted to do async events, for example - an issue Bob also happened to raise at the time.
To give a practical example, let's say I want to write a GUI interface to py2app. My main dialog has some text fields and checkboxes for basic setup info, plus a table view listing all dependencies, allowing users to check/uncheck the items they want/don't want included. The obvious way to implement this would be to call modulegraph to generate the table content, then take the list of checked items and feed it to py2app's package-building function via an 'includeitems' argument. I really don't want or need py2app to run modulegraph a second time just because it's been welded into the basemost layer.
If nothing else, a more loosely-coupled architecture takes pressure off the developer to anticipate and support every single possible use to which a user might want/need to put their system and/or its components now or in the future.
Hope that makes sense,
has -- http://freespace.virgin.net/hamish.sanderson/ _______________________________________________ Pythonmac-SIG maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonmac-sig
