Common gotchas upgrading from 4.0 -> 4.2

[edscott wilson garcia]

El mié, 03-11-2004 a las 14:57, Olivier Fourdan escribió:
> Hi Edscott,
> 
> On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 07:31 -0600, edscott wilson garcia wrote:
> > Another two problems is that inheritance does not work correctly and
> > each application creates a big hash table in memory each time it starts
> > up (IOW, bloat), most of it will not be used more than once. 
> > 
> > To fix the problems for the mime-icons module, I took Brian's code
> > apart, piece by piece, and rewrote the hash table business. To solve the
> > "big hash table", I allowed a theme to be opened with a fixed size. When
> > this is done, a shared disk based hash table is used instead of a memory
> > hash table, which greatly increases startup speed and reduces memory
> > footprint. Whenever an out-of-date disk based hashtable is requested, it
> > is automatically regenerated by means of the big hash table. 
> 
> I really thing we are too close from the release to implement it now. I
> prefer a well tested sub-optimal implementation rather than a ultra-
> optimized buggy implementation that gets loaded in all Xfce components
> because it's part of one of the base libraries... (I'm am not saying
> that you implementation is buggy, but if it's too recent, it's not
> tested enough for a final release)
> 
> So we can live with the big hash table for now, we'll see later for
> improving things in 4.4

Agreed. That's why I have refrained from proposing its use for other
modules up to now and the code is not included in the shared
libxfcegui4.so library. Just wanted to draw attention to the point. 

OTH, disk based hash table (dbh) is very stable code and has been used
by xffm since the very beginning (bookmarks, frequent files, combo
autocompletion, run history, recent files, and trash management).
AFAICR, there has not been a single bug caused by dbh yet. This is just
another point to keep in mind, since the testing of the disk cache
mechanism has been going on in xffm since the bookmarks stuff.  

regards,

Edscott



> 
> Cheers,
> Olivier.
>