Allow external access to Linear (and similar struct) fields after creation

[TiemenSch]

On occasion, I'm deserializing Linear structs (as an example) using serde, but I would like to be able to access the knots/elements afterwards (read-only would be sufficient). Would you consider supporting this? Either pub fields or getter methods would work for access, though read-only would probably require getters.

[NicolasKlenert]

Can you share what you want to do with the knots/elements afterwards?

This library allows curves without a direct representation of knots/edges and even adaptors which modify how the knots behave for example. So in general one can't return the knots or edges or it would not tell you the whole story of the curve anyways.

Maybe there is some solution to your problem which would work on all curves defined by this library which I would prefer.

[TiemenSch]

In my case, I build color palettes using linears under the hood that I would like to (export and) import using serde and offer edit functionality afterwards.

However, I would like to be able to offer users an interactive method of editing their color palette (i.e. tweak the knots).
If users bring their own palettes/linears (i.e. import only), I cannot access the source data when stored using linear. The linear is a black box. I could default to deriving fixed knot points for imports, but that would introduce Excel like silent conversion behaviour that is bound to frustrate users.

I could use another data format and only 'build' the linear as needed or do an unchecked conversion if I replicate the Sorted<_> contents well enough, but that I would like to avoid that duplication and bookkeeping if at all possible as well.

Does that make any sense?

[NicolasKlenert]

I do get your use case now, thanks for the clarification.

Read-only access can be supported. I won't make the internal fields public as this is in general not save (as the contracts of a curve might be broken).

As adaptors exist, all parameters of the adaptors would also need to be made readable, otherwise there would still be a black box. I will have to look later into how to best achieve this.