Guenter's model (was: Re: [PD] Re: Mac OS X installer with library documentation)

[Krzysztof Czaja]

Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
...
> If we have the core objects directly in the standard path (../extra),  
> then we can have the various additions in subfolders of that path.  As  
> long as the objects are compiled as individual files, they can be  
> instantiated separately.  A while back, I posted an example of this  

yes, it is a good start, certainly better than having no structure
at all...

Guenter's model has two parts.  One part is that any non-standard
object name is to be qualified by the relative path to its class'
library.  Second part is that any library may provide only a single
class.

These two parts are unrelated.  If the first part, using GG's
qualifiers, was widely adopted, then multi-class libraries would
just be expected to pass qualified names to class_new(), or
class_new() itself would be easily modified to impose that.

I think it is time to stop arguing for and against multi-class
libraries, because the actual challenge is in designing a good
model for the context in which a patch loads and operates,
maintaining a consistent behaviour in different environments and
through a long time.

Krzysztof

PS. GG's qualifiers are a good start, but they are not going to
work, unless one of the following happens:

. the set of predefined externals is always empty
. all predefined externals are loaded at startup
. class_new() is changed, so that [another/class] does not declare [class]

Besides, all externs using class_setsavefn() would have to be
revised.

PPS. Explicit use of GG's qualifiers is ugly and takes too much
space.  Some kind of abstraction-scoped "import" mechanism would
be necessary, anyway ([declare]?).