Re: Blacklisting themes?

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 02:04:17PM +0200, Benjamin Berg wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-21-06 at 20:25 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> > 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.

I don't think Morten's intent was to handle the blacklist at the
application level.  A more practical approach would be a bugbuddy
extension that would compare the current theme engine and version
against a central collection of known bad engines, aka a black list.
Then a user could be notified at the time of the crash that the
right solution is to stop using that theme.