Growth Hint

Sometimes a part is modified after it is placed in a package. Depending on the nature of the modification, the part might need to grow. For some physical package formats, this could be an expensive operation and could damage an otherwise efficiently interleaved package. Ideally, the part should be allowed to grow in-place, moving as few bytes as possible.

To support these scenarios, a package implementer can associate a growth hint with a part. [O1.1] The growth hint identifies the number of bytes by which the producer predicts that the part will grow. In a mapping to a particular physical format, this information might be used to reserve space to allow the part to grow in-place. This number serves as a hint only. The package implementer might ignore the growth hint or adhere only loosely to it when specifying the physical mapping. [O1.3] If the package implementer specifies a growth hint, it is set when a part is created and the package implementer shall not change the growth hint after the part has been created. [M1.16]