Re: Shipping Vera with 2.4

[Sander Vesik <sander_traveling yahoo co uk>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 28, 2003 at 07:11:38PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:
>
> > --- Michael Meeks <michael ximian com> wrote: > Hi Havoc,
> >
> > > On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 18:33, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > >
> > > > Take "recent documents" feature of GNOME 2.2 - it completely sucks
> > > > because of the big-three end user apps Mozilla, OpenOffice, and
> > > > Evolution, exactly zero of them use the "recent documents" feature.
> > > > There's a file-format-based spec for recent files now, and I guess
> > > > people are adding OpenOffice support, but it would have been much
> > > > easier with a D-BUS style system.
> > >
> > > 	I believe you confuse adoption with simplicity. Persuading umpteen
> > > projects to link to yet another heap of IPC is easier than parsing /
> > > writing a simple XML file ?
> >
> > gnome 2.2 is a quite new piece of software that not all that many ship yet -
> > it is extremely unsuprising nobody has bothered to offer support for new features
> > found in it yet.
>
>
> Not the point at all. The point is about what the recent files spec
> had to contain (how hard it was to design and write as an
> interoperable feature). As Alex says, you have to handle locking, file
> change notification, file format, etc.

Very much standard stuff practicly all programs do in the first place to 
avoid two copies of the file being edited at the same time.

> If you had shared IPC, then you could have just specified a message to
> add a new file, and a broadcast when the list changed, and that's it.

Saying 'and to add entries into the recently used files list you need to 
link to this stack of libraries and use these APIs' is in fact 
coinsiderably more complex code wise than specifying file locking. And also 
raises teh question of how much impact will various bugs in the layer you 
are linking to exposing you to and how you test it and so on.

> Havoc

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