Re: gnome games without gnome (osx, win32)

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2007, Callum McKenzie wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 19:18 +0100, Robert Staudinger wrote:
> > Most #ifdef-s are surrounding gconf calls. When getting serious about
> > a non-gnome version it might be an idea writing a simple gconf
> > abstraction, possibly in the egg namespace.
> > Something like
> > egg_conf_get_client_default()
> > egg_conf_client_get_string()
> > egg_conf_client_set_string()
> > ...
> > that wraps gconf or, if not available, manipulates a DOM tree holding
> > the settings.
> > Maybe something like that already exists?
>
> The appropriate response to for a missing gconf is for the app to fall
> back to some internal default since, the mere availability of gconf
> isn't enough to guarantee reliable answers form it.

Much the same way translations work.  A hardcoded default that will always
work and then everything else are optional extras.

That succint almost patronising explanation took years of trying to
explain to developers why they should have fallbacks and even though my
installation was botched or my homedir had dropped off the network their
application still shouldn't crash.  This is a problem most of Gnome and
everyone else suffers from but it only actually makes a difference in a
rarer cases (thin clients for example).

-- 
Alan