[platform-text-dev] Questions about 3.0 plan items

[Christopher Lenz <cmlenz@xxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I'm having a bit of a hard time trying to find details about some of the 
plan items for 3.0. Many of the descriptions on the plan outline are pretty 
coarse, and only few of the plan items seem to have bugzilla entries (and 
then most of those entries contain very few details :-P ).

So here we go ... if anyone can point me to documents that I have missed, 
please do so.

1. File Buffers (#40789)

What is the intention behind this, where can I find more details? If I'm 
writing a text editor, do I need to care about this, or is it transparent to 
me? And more specifically, do I need to care about the new 
'documentCreation' extension point?

2. Preference Handling / Support default configurations and preference
   inheritance

Again, can anyone provide more details about this item? A text-based editor 
needs a lot of custom code to provide the custumization that you'd expect 
from pretty much every text editor: print margin, current line marker, 
annotations, etc. It's easy to set that stuff up with TextEditor and 
SourceViewerDecorationSupport, but you still need to provide the preference 
pages/tabs to let the user customize the behaviour, and the user needs to 
touch the prefs of each and every editor if he/she just wants *all* text 
editors to show the print margin (for example).

So what this boils down to is: (a) is there anything planned to allow reuse 
of the typical text editor configuration blocks? See Workbench>Editors>Text 
Editor, Java>Editor and Ant>Editor as examples for a lot of annoying UI code 
copied around. And (b), is there anything planned to allow editors to use 
the same common preference values, while still providing their own extended 
customization options?

3. Extend partitioning/Introduce nested partitions

This is the most interesting to me. Is there a specific use case that 
requires such support?

This plan item *seems* to make it possible to more easily implement editors 
of compound text documents such as HTML files, where the main HTML editor 
could delegate to other plugins to let them handle e.g. embedded sections of 
CSS or JavaScript. Am I totally off with this conclusion?

Thanks,
-chris