Question: Individual annotations vs One large annotation (conceptual riddle for the interested)

[Gunnar Wrobel]

Quoting "Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab Systems)" <vanmeeuwen at kolabsys.com>:

> Bernhard Reiter wrote:
>> Am Sunday, 2. October 2011 18:55:24 schrieb Jeroen van Meeuwen (Kolab
>> Systems):
>> > > I could read out some possible technical advantages for using one large
>> > > one, but to me they are not the deciding factor. Many problems will
>> > > have to be solved for one annotation and this also means they can be
>> > > solved for many annotations as well.
>> >
>> > I've already stated for individual annotations all clients require the
>> > list of full paths of the annotations in order to be able to determine
>> > whether or not there could be any problem. The problem stated does *not*
>> > exist with using one annotation, and does exist with multiple
>> > annotations - to argue the same problems need to be resolved in each
>> > proposed solution is therefor false.
>>
>> You could make one known annotation to contain the list of dynamic
>> annotations if this is the issue. On the other hand, if a client wants
>> to understand the contents of a configuration option, it would know the
>> designated annotation for it as well.
>>
>
> Putting annotation paths that may or may not be known to a client into
> another, one, annotation known to all clients is quite the work-around to
> avoid having just one annotation to store (all of) the actual configuration.

True and I don't think the clients need to have access to the list of  
potential annotations. But that is also the reason for not choosing  
one big annotation: Not all clients will require access to all of them  
because the corresponding features will not always be supported. I  
still did not hear a compelling reason why we should lump two  
annotations together if the associated features are sufficiently  
independent of each other.

Cheers,

Gunnar

>
> Kind regards,
>
> Jeroen van Meeuwen
>
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