Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] Handling relocatable packages

[Nik C. <ni...@no...>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 03:57:15AM -0200, Ali Abdin wrote:
> * Nik Clayton (ni...@no...) wrote at 03:49 on 26/11/00:
> > > > How?  libsk.so?  By having a program that accepts search parameters and
> > > > returns XML with the results?  Some other mechanism?
> > > 
> > > I prefer a library that returns the xmlDocPtr of the file...
> > 
> > xmlDocPtr is specifc to libxml, isn't it?  What if I (as an application
> > programmer) want to use another XML library?  Since (part of) the point
> > behind XML is to reduce reliance on one specific parsing library, it
> > would be more open-ended if libsk could be used to find a document,
> > which can then be referred to by URL.  It's then up to the calling
> > application to open that URL and process it.
> 
> ScrollKeeper /has/ to pick an XML library to rely on for parsing stuff. 

That's fine.  It just shouldn't force any other application that wants
to use the results from SK to use the same library.  The library might
not even be available on some platforms, or languages.  Suppose I'm
writing a wrapper around SK in Perl.  What do I do with a C pointer in
Perl?

SK is going to be used to identify documents in the catalogue, so it seems
natural to me that the result of any queries should be a URL (or list of
URLs) that point to the matching document(s).  Let the calling
application decide what it wants to do with this URL.

> I was
> just suggesting "publicizing" this in the API...Anyway, you /could/ have
> libxml-specific stuff trapped in #ifdef's and just provide "other" people with
> the FILE descriptor to do their own parsing.

Still too C specific. 

> Note: to compile (and run) scrollkeeper you will need to have libxml
> installed.

Maybe to compile it.  But you can always compile it static, and ship the
binary to a system that doesn't have libxml installed.

N
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