Re: should destroying set the refcount to 0?

[Nat Friedman <nat helixcode com>]

I agree that it should be removed.  Someone has to audit our ref
counting, though.

Nat

Darin Adler <darin@eazel.com> writes:

> on 3/29/00 8:16 AM, Owen Taylor at otaylor@redhat.com wrote:
> 
> > Almost certainly not. If you have refcounting on an object
> > then you can't also have explicit destruction.
> >
> > For example: gtk_object_destroy() does not directly affect
> > the refcount at all. The only reason it usually results in
> > a widget being freed is that it remove the widget from its
> > parent, so the refcount drops to zero.
> > 
> > Either you have to have no _destroy() and just use unref(),
> > or you have to make _destroy() a "break known references"
> > operation.
> 
> My thinking on this is that there's no reason to have bonobo_object_destroy.
> I think the people get confused by the example of Gtk, where there's both
> ref counting and destroy and think that the two can coexist. But this is
> only appropriate if you create the notion of a destroyed but "still around"
> object like we have in Gtk with destroy and finalize.
> 
> Federico had to remove _destroy from GnomeVFSURI for a similar reason; it
> was in there but didn't really make sense.
> 
> I suggest we remove bonobo_object_destroy. But this requires modifying and
> checking over a lot of code. There are 26 calls to the function inside the
> bonobo module itself. They can all be changed to bonobo_object_unref, but
> there may be some cases where more than one _unref is actually needed.
> 
> In the mean time, it's still a good idea to have bonobo_object_destroy set
> the ref count to 0 and I'll add that to my patch. With that change, further
> calls to ref and unref will return_if_fail, so they'll be harmless and give
> out CRITICALs. Of course, actually using the object will still be a problem.
> We could add return_if_fail based on the ref count to more of the Bonobo
> object routines too if desired.
> 
>     -- Darin
> 
> 
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