Re: Exemplar configuration thoughts

Eric Crahen wrote:
> That's an interesting work around. You did bring up a good point, though. It
> would be a handy thing to have an inhertence model that would allow all
> changes made to the exemplar to be reflected in the projects that did not
> override that property. I think that with what I described an ExtensionPoint
> author would pretty easily be able to write such an extension since he/she'd
> have a reference to the Exemplar and could delegate to it whenever
> configuration was absent in the project instance.

Inheritance seems to be a fairly popular notion among other tools but 
giving it a decent GUI is rather hard. Somehow you have to differentiate 
overridden values and default values (and it has to survive during the 
form submission round-trip), and you have to let people revert the setting.

For systems that don't provide GUI, it's pretty easy, but for us, well...



> I could use the Project copy as a work around, but I feel like there might
> be a better solution for the longer term. (And there are still the issues
> about Descriptors and singleton-ness...)

I read your e-mail but it's not quite clear to me what problems you had 
with Descriptors.

Describables/Descriptors are really like Objects/Classes, so I find 
singleton semantics appropriate. If "it's easy to implement wrong,
and it's hard to confirm you implemented it right" as you say, I'd like 
to fix it, though. Maybe I need to expand on Describable.getDescriptor() 
javadoc?

--
Kohsuke Kawaguchi
Sun Microsystems                   kohsuke.kawaguchi@xxxxxxx

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