[Xenocide-programming] PAQ Files Management

[Federico A. L. <fl...@ma...>]

Hi Exio, what I promise is debt. I took a hard look on your design, it has 
improved a lot. However we rewrote the whole stuff based on your initial 
design. It was a 4 hours design effort and we think it is a good start, the 
idea was define the Services that the objects whould give you, however 
everybody make mistakes so if you find anything when implementing let me know.

Your design had some quirks, like for example you cannot handle multiple open 
files without having one file handler for each file (you you still do the fopen 
for each file, so we dont win anything from the PAQ File), we had added a proxy 
object called PAQFileSolidManipulator that would encapsulate that very same 
file handler. Another thing was some class names, it was pretty difficult to 
understand because name overloading for example PAQFile (what it is? A .PAQ 
File or a File inside the PAQ), seeing that we added the notion of a SolidFile 
(that is the .PAQ File). 

We went further on the Files, we added an Interface IIAbstractFile, but it wont 
be included in the PAQ File, it will be included in another package. The idea 
is in some time (when we need them) implement memory mapped files and other 
derived classes from it.

Another important thing was that we do not permit access to the user for the 
things that only the PAQ Manager have access to. In fact the user (developer) 
only have a View, it wont have the complete command set available to be used. 
We used a friend class for that, if you know of a better way to improve that, 
let me know cause it is pretty useful (if only C++ had Selective Export like 
Eiffel).

One far less important issue was misplaced use of the virtual keywork on some 
methods, but nothing to worry about YET.

The headers we are sending are not complete in implementation details, we 
though that you could handle that better so we add as less as we could (for 
example we didnt define the class PAQFileDescriptor and left deliveratly 
incomplete the IIAbstractFile and PAQFile classes). The same for attributes 
inside the classes. We tried to document everything so you wouldnt have a hard 
time reading it. Dont worry mamutas the docs from the Network Lib are on the 
way :D ...

Nice work overall, you will learn our style and write the things right from the 
start that just only requires practice. Now that you are going to start to 
implement it, try to give as much feedback as you can about your progress. The 
same if you find problems in the definition of some services, in short just 
drop an email and we will try to resolve the issue.

Greetings
Red Knight