Re: Pointers and spawning processes with glib

[Lex Trotman <elextr gmail com>]

On 10 December 2010 19:02, Robert Pearce <rob bdt-home demon co uk> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 10 Dec 2010 13:01:50 +1100 Lex wrote:
>>
>> It is pretty obvious it must be copied, even on windows where
>> fork/exec doesn't exist.
>
> It's pretty obvious if:
>  1) you understand how processes work and differ from threads and...
>  2) you like to think about how things work under the hood
>
> For a lot of users, like Rupert, it's not at all obvious. I don't think
> adding a note in the documentation is too much effort, and would be of
> some benefit.
>

I am not criticising Rupert, he's been reading the code, good, but he
didn't go far enough, fork/exec is well explained in many books and
Google-able documents, starting with Wikipedia.

The Glib reference documentation is not intended to be an introduction
to any topic.  Programmers should not expect to use just a reference
manual if they do not understand the concepts behind it.

So if a programmer doesn't know anything about processes, hashes, URIs
or any of the other concepts handled in Glib( or windowed graphics
topics in GTK+) they should look at the introductory material
available elsewhere.  The reference manual would become too big and
unwieldy if it tried to be a conceptual introduction to all its topics
as well.

Don't get me wrong, I think that the GLib/GTK+ documentation has lots
of problems, but this isn't one of them.

Cheers
Lex

>
> Cheers,
> Rob
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