Re: GNUstep's release readiness

[Enrico Sersale]

On Thu, 26 Dec 2002, Jonathan Gapen wrote:

> ...
>
> 2) Application Robustness
>
>      Before a major release of the current GNUstep applications, they've
> got to become much more robust.  I have run into major flaws in many
> applications due to the lack of sanity-checking on external information.
>      Terminal.app:  Blows up if given invalid font specifications in user
> defaults because it does not check that it got a valid object back from
> NSFont.
>      MusicBox.app:  Blows up if I press 'play' without loading a file, as
> it does not check to see if any file has been loaded.
>      GWorkspace.app:  Uses integers instead of booleans to store boolean
> values in user defaults, explicitly checks NSGlobalDomain for some values
> so I can't override them on a per-application or single-run basis, and
> also blows up if presented with certain invalid user defaults values.

Well, GWorkspace uses NSStrings, (not integers) to store boolean values in
the defaults because, when I wrote the first versions, -boolForKey: didn't
work.
Successively, I switched to -boolForKey: but, some months ago,
NSUserDefaults was broken again and I switched back to the old solution.

Regarding NSGlobalDomain: I need to check it only to read the value of
"GSFileBrowserHideDotFiles", that is set by the "expert" module of
Preferences.app.

Regarding the blow up: can you tell me exactly what do you mean with "if
presented with certain invalid user defaults values"? I'm about to make a
new release and I don't want to leave bugs around.

>      GNUMail.app:  Does not handle unexpected IMAP conditions and errors
> (such as a dropped connection) well.
>      All such instances must be cleaned up before any release intended for
> end-users and not other developers.
>
> ...