torios-dev team mailing list archive

[Israel <israel@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,
I have been doing some very extensive work on the settings manager.

One really big improvement I am working on is hardening the program
against broken jwmrc files.
This is a pretty major effort, and is not finished by any means...  but
it has also exposed other issues and created some rather funny errors.

For example,
jwm-settings-manager works fine on my Utopic computer.
it works fine on my super old desktop computer
but it wouldn't work on my kids laptop

so, I debugged it (by running gdb jwm-settings-manager)
lo an behold I was getting a mysterious readdir() error.
It was hard to find, because it only happened on one computer, so it has
taken me about a week(?) to really find where the issue was.
I have since prevented the initial crash from startup issue... so even
if readdir() fails, it will only be after the user opens a specific
portion of the program.
that said, I do think I have finally crushed the error.

There are new issues that have crept in since reworking the code so
much.... and so I have made every effort to comment the code heavily,
and clean up messy code, as well as restructure things that were not
quite as nice.  So, the commenting in the code **should** make it much
easier for anyone to jump in and work on something (as long as they are
familiar with tinyxml2 and fltk... or if they want to study the
documentation for those)
commenting heavily in code also helps me to remember what I was doing in
a function.  This way, if I can think of a better way to tackle the
problem I will know what I was doing and how to implement the new code
to produce the same result (but better)


There are new features but those are mostly hidden to the user, and some
are not fully integrated yet...  I am getting closer to the point that I
am ready to release a stable version...  but not until I get the last
bits of overhaul done.  It needs to be done.

-- 
Regards

-Israel
ToriOS Team