The RfC documents were written to complement discussions of the Lumiera developers;
yet since the time where ''Ichthyo'' is working basically alone on the project,
this kind of discussions have ceased. During the following years, some ideas
promoted by the existing RfC documents became rather detached from the
actual state of development in the code base.
Many of the existing RfC documents require some commentary to place them
into context, and some of the decisions taken in the early stage of the
project should be **re-assessed**. This includes the decision to reject
some proposals, which initially might have seemed desirable, yet could not
be reconciled with the understanding of the matter and topic in question,
as was gained through the ongoing analysis and development.
Some sections of the Lumiera website document meeting minutes,
discussion protocols and design proposals from the early days
of the project; these pages were initially authored in the
»Moin Moin Wiki« operated by Cehteh on pipapo.org at that time;
this wiki backed the first publications of the »Cinelerra-3«
initiative, which turned into the Lumiera project eventually.
Some years later, those pages were transliterated into Asciidoc
semi-automatically, resulting in a lot of broken markup and links.
This is a long standing maintenance problem problem plaguing the
Lumiera website, since those breakages cause a lot of warnings
and flood the logs of any linkchecker run.
There is a long-standing RfC which basically describes the
same idea on a much wider, conceptual scope. Indeed I consider
this approach used here for solving the problem with GUI uptades
also as a proof of concept, to be expanded to a much wider scope
in case it works out well.
The new insight here is, that, by transferring a diff in pull mode,
we can circumvent the architectural problems with typing, which
showed up quite clearly in earlier design studies towards this
concept. The change from push to pull is by far not so fundamental
as it looks, since the sender still may initiate the exchange
by sending a message offering the diff iterator for the receiver
to pull. This way, we get a handshake and still sustain the
crucial part, which is to decouple the data representation
and give the receiver full control over the interpretation
of the exchanged data.
