[Geany-Devel] A direction for Geany

[Matthew Brush]

On 13-11-15 07:02 AM, Colomban Wendling wrote:
> Le 15/11/2013 04:19, Matthew Brush a écrit :
>> On 13-11-14 10:56 AM, Dimitar Zhekov wrote:
>>> On Tue, 12 Nov 2013 17:47:26 -0800
>>> Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 13-11-12 10:43 AM, Dimitar Zhekov wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 01:31:35 -0800
>>>>> Matthew Brush <mbrush at codebrainz.ca> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> 1. An architecture that allows multi-threading to be used for non-GUI
>>>>>>> tasks.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Another (perhaps more obvious) candidate here is file loading/saving,
>>>>>> which is *way* easier than the parsing stuff since [...] and because
>>>>>> Scintilla and GIO make this quite easy (probably wouldn't even require
>>>>>> threads but just mainloop/async stuff).
>>>>>
>>>>> We don't even have a proper saving with all GIO/GFile/whatever levels,
>>>>> because some people haven't completed even one level properly.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I didn't understand what this means?
>>>
>>> We have several options to save a file in different ways, because all
>>> GLib stuff is either unreliable or has side effenct (owner and
>>> permissions change).
>>>
>>
>> So fix GLib instead of adding a bunch of different workarounds to Geany.
>> Geany's code isn't the place to work around bugs in the *open source*,
>> supposedly cross-platform toolkit we use, it completely defeats the
>> purpose of using such a library in the first place. If we can fix it
>> Geany, we can just as easily contribute the fixes to GLib instead. If
>> the fixes are too hackish or not good enough to be accepted in GLib, why
>> would we want them in Geany's code?
>
> Easier said than done unfortunately.  The GIO problem about losing data
> on write failure has been discussed on their bug tracker, and the
> problem is that the fix isn't as obvious at it seems, and people didn't
> really agree on how it should be addressed.  Unfortunately it didn't go
> much further AFAIK, and people started to use hacks and workarounds.
>
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=602412
>

Right, but is it worth having 2 or 3 ways of writing a file in Geany's 
code, only selectable through hidden/various preference, another 
(presumably) large code-paths of absolutely critical code, which never 
gets any regular testing (except for the default way), and that 99% of 
users will never use or care about? I mean if many other Gtk apps are 
doing it this way and the sky hasn't fallen (eg. there's only 12 
comments on that bug report, many from developers, no crazy users crying 
about lost data and stuff), is it an indication that it's just not that 
important enough to warrant such workarounds?

Cheers,
Matthew Brush