[Xapian-tickets] [Xapian] #173: Bindings should have an explicit WritableDatabase::close() method

[Xapian]

#173: Bindings should have an explicit WritableDatabase::close() method
-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  richard          |        Owner:  richard  
     Type:  enhancement      |       Status:  reopened 
 Priority:  normal           |    Milestone:  1.1.0    
Component:  Xapian-bindings  |      Version:  SVN trunk
 Severity:  normal           |   Resolution:           
 Keywords:                   |    Blockedby:           
 Platform:  All              |     Blocking:           
-----------------------------+----------------------------------------------
Changes (by olly):

  * status:  closed => reopened
  * resolution:  fixed =>


Comment:

 Hmm, I think we need to think about the semantics of this a bit more so
 I'm going to reopen this for now to make sure we do before 1.1.0.

 Declaring that calling any methods of the object (apart from to call
 close() on it again) as "undefined" seems a bit unhelpful.  Assuming that
 this is the ISO C definition of "undefined", then that means
 '''anything''' can happen.  Since things like documents and iterators
 implicitly access the database, I think we want to promise more than this.
 It's also bad to allow access to undefined behaviour from the bindings.

 I think "unspecified" is closer to what we want here - in reality, either
 you'll get an exception, or it'll use some cached value (the "right"
 answer) or some default behaviour (e.g. behaving as an empty database in
 many ways for inmemory).

 I'm not sure we want to promise to throw an exception for any use.
 Perhaps we should aim for
 the "right" answer or an exception?  Having to gate all inmemory methods
 isn't a big deal if we get a consistency win that way - it's not currently
 built for performance and will be replaced by a variant of the current
 disk-based backend eventually anyway.

 Side issue - there's no feature test for this in the bindings!

-- 
Ticket URL: <http://trac.xapian.org/ticket/173#comment:12>
Xapian <http://xapian.org/>
Xapian