[imp-dev] Questions & proposed changes to preferences specification lang

["Robert M. Fuhrer" <rfuhrer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Stan,

Remind me: What's special about a "special value"?

Also, what does "removable" mean?

Also, would you object to making certain parts of the specification
optional? E.g., the entire "tabs" section could be optional, in which
case the full set of tabs would be present with their "standard  
behavior"
(whatever that is :-)). Likewise, we could make "hasspecial" and
"isremovable" optional, with sensible defaults.

Next, I think it would be somewhat simpler to have the conditional
enablement specifications part of the field specification, rather than
in a separate section. This way everything about a field is localized.
E.g.:

  boolean ExecutableToUse { ... enabledif UseDefaultExecutable; }

Finally, there are a few bits of info that reside in a separate file to
control the compilation process, but I think it would also be better
to put those in the main file (unless for some reason you want to
support spreading a single specification across multiple files?).

BTW, I made a few fixes to the prefspecs project's plugin.xml:
there were a couple of duplicated extension specifications,
and the builder/nature IDs had an extra ".prefspecs" in them.

Cheers,
 - Bob