Re: [Pyobjc-dev] Separating functionality into modules

[<bb...@ma...>]

On Saturday, November 16, 2002, at 07:51 PM, Jack Jansen wrote:
>> None of this is to say that the extensions to the AppKit should not 
>> be separated out -- I have nothing against that, but I also am not 
>> strongly attracted to doing so.
>
> My main reason for suggesting this is support. If our AppKit is 
> Apple's AppKit except things we can't implement, and the 
> PyObjC-specific stuff (which either doesn't make sense for ObjC, or 
> which we've added because we think it's an omission on Apple's side) 
> is in a different place this should make it easier to look up stuff in 
> documentation. That should forestall questions to this group. And I'm 
> actually already slightly trembling at the thought of what might 
> happen once PyObjC gets decent exposure...

I can certainly understand that line of thinking and I have a feeling 
the exposure on PyObjC is going to grow fairly exponentially in the 
near future.

There are really two separate kinds of division we are discussing;  
division of PyObjC specific functionality and division of extensions to 
objc / AppKit / Foundation / Address Book.

The first is one that exists now, but is neither complete nor correct 
(not a criticism -- this isn't something that any of us have dumped a 
huge amount of thought into).  Mostly, there are bits specific to 
Foundation that are lumped down into objc.

The second division is the one that Jack describes above;  how to 
divide things such that our stuff vs. Apple's stuff is easy to 
differentiate.   (If I'm understanding the issue correctly).

Currently, help(Foundation) and help(AppKit) take a long, long time-- 
maybe forever-- and trigger some nasty warnings from the runtime.

In any case, it would seem that help(Foundation) and help(AppKit) 
should really only document the functionality that we provide or 
modify.  If something works exactly like it does in ObjC-- i.e. is a 
part of the Foundation or AppKit APIs-- then the developer should go 
straight to the source, I would think...?

I admit I haven't given nearly enough thought to this problem as I 
should.

b.bum