Code factorization

[Tamaranch]

Hi everyone,

The following concerns potentially all XFCE components, so I thought of using the mailing list rather than Gitlab: sorry if it wasn't a good idea, and thanks by advance to indicate me a better place for this type of comment in this case.

In a previous MR (https://gitlab.xfce.org/xfce/libxfce4util/-/merge_requests/1), I added the function xfce_append_quoted() and the macro STR_IS_EMPTY() to libxfce4util API, in order to replace later their various occurrences in XFCE components, where they appear in one form or another.

Now that I took a closer look, I don't know how this should be done, or even if this should be done, despite the fact that using this kind of utilities from only one (or a few) central place, seems obviously a better way to do than duplicating the code in all components that need them.

Here are the two problems I encounter:
1. Using these utilities from a central place implies to add this central place as a dependency to many XFCE components, which is not necessarily harmless.
2. Should there be one central place or several, and if there is only one, which one?
For instance, in the case of STR_IS_EMPTY(), exo appears as a concurrent to libxfce4util, with its exo_str_is_empty().

To finish and illustrate, here is a list of XFCE components where I found occurrences of these patterns:
1. _append_quoted:
xfce4-panel: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=_append_quoted&group_id=&project_id=13&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
tumbler: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=_append_quoted&group_id=&project_id=10&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
thunar: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=_append_quoted&group_id=&project_id=8&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar

2. str_is_empty:
xfce4-panel: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&snippets=&scope=&repository_ref=master&search=str_is_empty&project_id=13
thunar: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&snippets=&scope=&repository_ref=master&search=str_is_empty&project_id=8
xfce4-settings: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=str_is_empty&group_id=&project_id=16&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
exo: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=str_is_empty&group_id=&project_id=4&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
xfce4-whiskermenu-plugin: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=str_is_empty&group_id=&project_id=74&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
xfce4-mailwatch-plugin: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=str_is_empty&group_id=&project_id=55&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar
xfce4-indicator-plugin: https://gitlab.xfce.org/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=str_is_empty&group_id=&project_id=53&search_code=true&repository_ref=master&nav_source=navbar

Note that it remains the components where the code of STR_IS_EMPTY() (or ! STR_IS_EMPTY()) appears directly in one form or another, like in mousepad (I did not search for all these occurrences yet):
text == NULL || *text == '\0'
filename != NULL && *filename != '\0'

Best regards,
Tamaranch
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce4-dev/attachments/20200704/81e19f23/attachment.html>