I wrote:

However, I'd hate to have to produce a certain winding rule for the exterior and the holes in order to use the same data for more complicated GIS calculations such as logical operations and buffering. IMHO it should be just as easy as choosing to use the even-odd filling rule instead of the winding rule.

To which Barend Gehrels replied:

It cannot be called from the algorithms themselves: to verify the winding rule the area has to be calculated beforehand. This will drastically decrease performance.

Certainly area calculation is significantly faster than logical operations and buffering.

The solution might be a traits class telling the winding rule the polygon type has.

Agreed. [Sorry about the unorthodox quoting, I rebuilt the reply by googling] --> Mika Heiskanen