On Feb 8, 2006, at 10:12 PM, Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
Several folks have expressed interest in getting people together to
talk about collections and notifications, and what we should do in
0.7.
Here's a short list of problems as I understand them:
- The detail view displays the collections that an item appears in
-- this needs to be supported efficiently.
Yes, this is a problem. We originally thought that using monitors
was going to work for this, but they don't handle all the cases.
- Item Notifications: we agreed to do this at the end of 0.6. (Bug
4592) In 0.7 we'll have automatic syncing for sharing, thus more
going on in background threats, thus more need for notifications to
the detail view on a per item basis.
- Performance issues. As Andi, John and others were chasing down
slow use cases in 0.6, they ran into some thorny issues that we
ended up punting.
Do we have bug numbers for these issues? Or mailing list
discussions? I can no longer remember the precise details for this,
so this is only stirring vague thoughts for me.
- Getting the layering correct. We've described this as "moving
collections below the line". We need to: (a) make sure we have a
clean reasonable API for collections as used by the higher level
layers (b) move application specific details like color out of the
generic notion of a collection (c) move collections to the right
layer of the architecture -- if collections are as generic as items
they belong in a lower layer. We need to do something similar for
notifications.
There has been a lot of "seepage" in both directions. There are a
bunch of attributes on AbstractCollection which don't belong there,
and I think that InclusionExclusionCollection and
IndexedSelectionCollection probably should live "above the line".
At the same time, there is a bunch lower level repository stuff,
indexing API in particular which as leaked into application code.
It would be very helpful to have more information about how the
sidebar actually uses collections - which collection classes are
being used by the sidebar, what kinds of indexes, and so forth.
Any others to add to the list?
It might help to review the requirements section of the Item
Collection spec for 0.6 <http://svn.osafoundation.org/docs/trunk/docs/
specs/rel0_6/ItemCollection-0.6.html> The details of the
implementation are much different from what we ended up with but the
requirements section is in good shape. I am in the middle of
updating that spec, but I will probably not be done in time for
Monday's meeting
The other thing that I would point out is that the existing
implementation of notification can only be generously described as a
hack. It tries to cobble together the necessary information from
several sources, the repository's set notifications, the repository
change history, and some auxiliary data structures in order to
produce the correct stream of notifications. It seems to me that
logical result of moving collections "below the line" would be to
also modify the implementation of notification and/or the
implementation of the repository to achieve the semantics that we are
looking for at the application level.
Ted
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