Code factorization

[Simon Steinbeiss]

Hi Tamaranch,

first of all thanks a lot for making the effort to cleaning up code and
making it more maintainable! Most people are only interested in adding (or
requesting) features.
Secondly the mailing list is a good - albeit sometimes rather quiet - place
for such general discussions.

ad 1) I would say that for most core components the dependency on
libxfce4util is rather harmless (xfce4-panel, thunar, xfce4-settings
already depend on it). And by extension panel plugins can decide to rely on
libxfce4util because this library is anyway required by the panel...
For components that may also be used independently (like tumbler, iirc it
was used for Nokia's own Android competitor back in the day) this can be a
separate discussion if it's really just about a single macro vs. the
dependency on an additional library to cover that. I would

ad 2) The central place for the two functions you started to unify was also
well-chosen as I'd rather take things out of exo than continue to build it
up. From where I stand there are a few things in exo which should perform
an exodus (pun intended) - much as we did for the exo-helpers and preferred
apps dialog already by moving it to xfce4-settings.

But these are just my personal 2cents.
Cheers
Simon

On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 11:36 PM Tamaranch <trash.paradise at protonmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Xfce4-dev mailing list
> Xfce4-dev at xfce.org
> https://mail.xfce.org/mailman/listinfo/xfce4-dev
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