[SailfishDevel] Harbour news

Thomas Perl th.perl at gmail.com
Wed Dec 18 14:33:40 UTC 2013


Hi again,

2013/12/18  <dcaliste at free.fr>:
> - libxml2. As far as I know, their API is quite stable now even if it was not
> the case in the past (I remember having some trouble with it in 2003, but it's
> history now !).

I've added it to the list of libs to be considered. Let's see...

> - gconf. I allows to access gconf keys. It was the prefered way to store
> application preferences in the Maemo days, so many codes are using it. As for
> the Glib stuff, it has a stable API and is available already in Mer.

As the Wikipedia page[1] says:

"It is in the process of being deprecated as part of the Gnome 3
transition. Migration to its replacement, GSettings and dconf, is
ongoing."

The replacement is probably going to be dconf instead of GSettings,
but let's keep this open for now. If you are using Qt, you can just
use QSettings and should be good to go.

What we probably will have at some point is
restrictions/guidelines/best practices for the storage location of
settings. Some apps hardcode /home/nemo/ (or a subdirectory below),
which is bad and will probably be disallowed in the future (that
doesn't mean you can't write there, just that you shouldn't assume
that the username is "nemo" or that you can write anywhere). We're in
the process of figuring out the best way of solving this, if you are a
Qt application developer, use QStandardPaths[2] to be on the safe side
- if and when the new rules/best practices are in effect,
QStandardPaths will do the right thing (if it doesn't do that
already). For non-Qt users we'll either have documentation on how to
determine the storage paths or a small lib/code snippet that does so,
and we'll probably use XDG Basedir Specs + some additions for Harbour
apps. This is still not set in stone, so ignore that for now, but be
prepare to stop hardcoding /home/nemo/, and start using
QStandardPaths/QSettings (or write your code in such a way that the
base directory for settings is easy to change later on).

2013/12/18 Martin Grimme <martin.grimme at gmail.com>:
> What about stock icons (those from
> /usr/share/theme/jolla-ambient/icons/ that you can use with
> image://theme/ URIs) ? I'm developing an app that for the Sailfish
> look & feel would like to make heavy use of them.

There are no checks so far for this, it's probably a good idea to use
"image://theme/" as the way to retrieve this icons, as this might
allow us to scan packages in the future and determine which icons are
used. The worst thing that could happen in this case is that the icons
are missing, which - while still bad - is not as bad as an application
not starting up because of missing libs/symbols or crashing because of
changed ABI.

2013/12/18 Tone Kastlunger <users.giulietta at gmail.com>:
> on our end transfer-engine library addition would be great :)

I've added this to the list of libs to be considered. Let's see..


HTH :)
Thomas

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GConf
[2] http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-5.0/qtcore/qstandardpaths.html


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