Re: Blacklisting themes?

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 15:08 -0400, Morten Welinder wrote:

> The application programmer has no choice in the matter and cannot
> really test with
> all kinds of themes and all kinds of versions of them.  But the
> resulting crashes are
> still going to be blamed on the application and poor me.

So the sequence goes:

1. User gets a crash in gnumeric-n.m, reports it.

2. Developer determines that the crash is in the theme engine.

3. Developer blacklists the theme engine; releases gnumeric-n.m+1

4. User updates gnumeric, and can't run it anymore because it barfs on
that engine.  He still risks crashes in other apps.

I don't think blacklisting will work due to (4).  If you require the
user to upgrade the app, then the user may as well update the theme
engine, too.

It's better to tell the user "you should really update your theme
engine"; that will fix his problem and prevent crashes in other apps as
well.

It would be better to capture the thing that caused this particular bug,
and to make Manu Cornet's theme engine torturer replicate it.  That way
people can run their theme engines through the torturer before releasing
them.

  Federico