If you are at all interested in how things get registered in XPCOM, this is a Must read.
I checked in an interface which exclusively does component registration (see bug 115853). http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/xpcom/components/nsIComponentRegistrar.idl This interface is primarily for populating the component manager with existing nsIFactory objects or for the nsIModule generic module code. This interfaces was not designed to complete replace the obsolete component manager API. For *some* callers, migration will not occur until some later date. First group is the component loaders. They are still privy to some internal knowledge of how the component manager works. Until we need to define the interface between a loader and the component manager, I feel that we can leave these call sites alone. I also left the plugin code alone. For whatever historical reason, this code reaches behind the component managers back and accesses the component registry directly. This is bad and will break as soon as I change the registry format. I didn't fix this because I was too worried about regressions prior to mozilla 1.0. The last item I did not convert was the python connect code. I have contacted the owner regarding this matter. An overview of the changes include: 1. Removal of the references to the internal registry name/path from methods. These strings are now commented such that they are to be passed from the nsIModule callbacks back to this new interface. 2. Removal |replace| flag. Clients can, if they need, query for existence of a CID/ContractID before trying to register. Most cases clients pass true today. 3. Removal |persist| flag. Clients can, if they need, unregister. 4. registerComponentSpec is now registerFactoryLocation. Including changes (2), (3). 5. registerComponentWithType, registerComponentLib were removed because equivalently functionally can be obtained with registerFactoryLocation. Furthermore, registerComponentLib was a native specific shortcut API which is not widely used anymore. 6. autoRegister is still autoRegister, but it no longer has a time id. Autoregistration is performed when autoRegister is called. XPCOM does not need to have hooks to call autoregister at specific times; client code can call autoRegister when registration is needed. In practice, this value abused the loader code. 7. the enumerate functions now return nsISimpleEnumerator. This interface is marked UNDER_REVIEW. Please post your comments to either the newsgroup or the bug. We can take comments and make changes up until Mozilla 1.0 (I would prefer .99), but by that time, what we have must be frozen. -- Doug Turner
