From: Jeremy Whetzel <jeremy@...>
Date: 2003-08-22T13:16:23+09:00
Subject: Re: One Module for one Class?

On Thu, 21 Aug 2003 13:48:58 +0900
"Brett H. Williams" <brett_williams@agilent.com> wrote:

> On Aug 21, Jeremy Whetzel wrote:
>
> > For example, if I have an object that represents
> > a software tarball, and that object has a number of attributes such
> > as dependancies, reverse dependancies, comments, versions, etc, and
> > then I have all the methods that go with it for fetching,
> > configuring, building, resolving dependancies, etc, would it make
> > more sense to keep all those methods out of the class or leave them
> > in the class, even though it would make that class huge?


> My personal sense would be to represent some of these 'attributes' as
> members of their own class, i.e. have a Dependency class which you use
> through composition.  Your 'Tarball' class would then have a container
> of'Dependency' objects (and so forth for other things which have a
> logical grouping).

I had thought of that, but I believe I chose poor wording in saying a
"tarball object". I was thinking more specifically of having a"port"
class that has all those different attributes.  The thing with making
the dependancies a seperate class is that they can also have
dependancies. Essentially they're all ports requiring ports requiring
ports.  They're all kind of the same object.  
 
> My personal taste suggests you should not make a module which can't
> usefully be mixed in to any other class than the one you have in mind.

Understood, and I feel the same way.  To me it just seemed kind of
awkward, although so did having a huge class with loads of methods...

> You can even have several files, which all contain method definitions
> for the one class, grouped by what they do :-P  In some ways I like
> that better than a bunch of mixins.

I like this idea, too.  Perhaps I'll give it a shot.

> OT:  Isn't the biggest complaint right now about Gentoo's portage
> speed? It's written in Python, but I think you might run into the same
> problem with a similar implementation written in Ruby.

This may be.  I hadn't actually used Gentoo's portage system in quite a
while.  I've been unable to get the darn thing to build on my system. 
=0p  But when I used it 6+ months ago, the speed of portage itself
seemed fine, especially comparing it to the time to download and build
stuff. *g*  I'm just mainly doing this as a learning experience and for
benefit of myself while using FreeBSD.

Thanks,
Jeremy