Re: [Xmltv-devel] Configuration Conversation Proposal

[Ed A. <ed...@me...>]

On 25 Jan 2003, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote:

>The second way that the grabber and the front end program can
>communicate is by establishing a two-way communication over the
>grabber's standard input and output.

This makes much more sense than running the grabber several times to
answer one question each time.

You just need to make sure stdin and stdout are unbuffered.

>The advantages of this mode is that it's more efficient.  The
>disadvantage is that some front-end implementations may find it
>difficult to implement this mode.

How so?  Even on Windows this sort of thing is possible.  (Hmm, maybe
not Windows 95/98/Me.  We need to check whether these have real
pipes.)

Actually, if you have a grabber which communicates on stdin and stdout
you can probably simulate the style of running it lots of times: just
give it a bit of input, see what it says before reaching EOF, and the
next time give it a bit more input.  The configuration file won't be
written to disk until the grabber's configuration has completed
successfully.

-- 
Ed Avis <ed...@me...>