Re: My 2c

Herman Bruyninckx wrote :
| "compatibility" doesn't seem to be the correct term: it suggests too
| much that our efforts would go to glue legacy code together. I want to
| achieve more: build a new consistent framework (such that
| compatibility follows ``automatically'').

Yes, that's exactly what I meant :)


| > At the momment, a question that I am asking is: does IDL provide
| > sufficient level of description/abstraction to suit our needs?
| > From the experience of GenoM, I would say no. That is: we must extend
| > somehow the abstraction of the description we'd like to share.
| 
| I would like to see some examples from your experience. At this
| moment, I don't fully see where the limits are :-)

Well, I think that the limit is that there is no limit :).
IDL seems to be too much permissive and not focused enough on the fact
that we'll want to describe every functionality (let's call them
"modules") wrt. the "consistent framework" we'll have defined.
If you let anybody describe what he wants, you'll never achieve a
consitent system.
[ I only had a quick look on IDL so I might be totally wrong... ]

Basically, what we want is a language that will describe what services a
module can give to other modules, what are the inputs and outputs of
each service, what are the requirements on the input data
(f.i. frequency, precision, quality...), a similar description of output
data, and other information like the context required to run the services
(e.g. incompatibilites between services, resource consumption, ...).

I fell this like a hard task if the language you use for the description
does not restrict what you can put into the description. But if you think
this is achievable with IDL we should definitely consider using it!