[openbeos] BObjectList vs. TypedList

Hi,

I believe, this has not been discussed yet, but will soon be of 
relevance for the SK team; therefore I bring it up. Most of you 
certainly know the nice class BObjectList, a type save and extended 
BList subclass. It is part of the OpenTracker source and, due to its 
usefullness, already found its way into our repository (headers/private
/shared/ObjectList.h).

Now there exist two facts, that may be less well known:

1) There exists a very similar class, TypedList, which has been used by 
Be internally. I believe, that TypedList has been copied and renamed to 
BObjectList, when the Tracker source has been released. At this time 
they may differ a bit.

2) Both classes are not directly derived from BList, but from 
_PointerList_ and PointerList respectively. Neither of these classes 
has an OpenBeOS implementation yet (hint, hint ;-).

Why bother, you might ask, when TypedList was used internally only, 
then we can just drop it?! Well, unfortunately its usage `leaked' into 
private but visible API, the Device (Map) API, the SK team is about to 
tackle. It is used in the OpenTracker (as well as in mountvolume (and 
should also be used in DriveSetup, BTW)) and thus we have to replicate 
it.

So the question at hand is: Do we want to implement both list classes? 
Personally I would vote for dropping TypedList. The consequence is 
obviously, that we would also drop binary and source compatibility with 
respect to the Device API. But since the only applications using that 
private API are either open source (OpenTracker) or have to be 
replicated by us anyway (mountvolume), that wouldn't actually harm.

Opinions?

CU, Ingo

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