Re: Another suggested libgnome API change

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 03Sep2001 06:43PM (-0400), Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:
> 
> > Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes:
> > > I'd like to add GError arguments to all the gnome-exec functions so
> > > they can be reimplemented in terms of g_spawn and give proper error
> > > reporting (instead of just 0 or -1).
> > > 
> > > Apps will probably find it easier to port to GError-ized versions of
> > > these calls than g_spawn, but they may as well get decent error
> > > reporting and share implementation in the meantime.
> > > 
> > > I can get the API-changing part of this done today (just add GError
> > > arguments) and the rest pretty quickly as well.
> > > 
> > > Thoughts?
> > > 
> > 
> > If you're going to deprecate the gnome functions (which I think is a
> > good idea), I'd follow the general rule "never deprecate and break at
> > the same time." That makes people port their stuff twice, once on
> > initial "get it to compile" and once on "make it deprecation-clean."
> > GTK tries pretty hard to avoid doing this.
> 
> I'd like to see some pretty heavy deprecation here, too.  I don't see
> much use for this API beyond the run-in-terminal variant.  If there's
> something here that is useful that isn't in gspawn, we need to add it.
> However, all I see is alternative APIs to the same basic functions.
> 

Further discussion on IRC with Jonathan and George suggests the
following:

- Deprecate the whole current gnome-exec.h API.

- Add the following functions non-deprecated to gnome-exec.h; they
work with g_spawn-style NULL-terminated argv vectors and should allow
the whole range of current gnome-exec functionality with g_spawn.


char **gnome_prepend_terminal_to_argv         (char **argv); 
char **gnome_commandline_to_shell_argv        (char  *commandline);
char **gnome_commandline_to_terminal_argv     (char  *commandline);
char  *gnome_argv_to_shell_quoted_commandline (char **argv);


 - Maciej