SAMP RFC changes

[Juan de Dios Santander Vela]

El 20/01/2009, a las 13:26, Mark Taylor escribió:

> Bob,
>
> I have now addressed your comments from the SAMP RFC.
> I have added responses on the wiki page
>
>   http://www.ivoa.net/cgi-bin/twiki/bin/view/IVOA/SampRfcDiscussionV11
>
> and have made corresponding edits to the SAMP document which you can
> see in the Volute repository:
>
>   http://code.google.com/p/volute/source/diff?spec=svn934&r=933&format=side&path=/trunk/projects/samp/doc/samp.tex&old_path=/trunk/projects/samp/doc/samp.tex&old=923
>
> If there is anything you're still unhappy with, please say. Thanks  
> again for your input.


I just came today with a doubt that I think it could be clarified in  
the specification: what if a developer wants to augment an existing  
application domain MType with an additional, obviously optional  
parameter? This seems to be encouraged by the extensibility hooks  
everywhere in SAMP (free MTypes, named parameters tagged with data  
types).

In particular, I was thinking of adding a session-id parameter to  
image.load.fits and table.load.votable, so that applications using  
that session-id can use it to trace related data loads, but those not  
knowing about it will happily discard it, and the MType semantics have  
not been changed.

But this brings a problem: even if a MType parameter is optional,  
should all applications heed it? For instance, a script with no GUI  
might choose to ignore the table-id or name parameters
of a table.load.votable message. Should we state that optional  
parameters may have no side-effects on receiving applications if they  
so choose, or that an MType message functionality should not be  
fundamentally changed by the lack of optional parameters with no  
default values?

Perhaps this should not go into this version, but I think it should be  
taken into account...

-- 
Juan de Dios Santander Vela
Diplomado en CC. Físicas, Ingeniero en Electrónica
Doctorando en Tecnologías Multimedia
Becario Predoctoral del Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra: Una retirada no es una derrota.