Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Developer Rant #1 :)

[Br'fin <br...@ma...>]

> Of course, the flip side of that is, what if we *do* want to take 
> advantage of features only available on 1 platform? There was an 
> enormous argument on the A1 list over whether plain XML or Apple's 
> property list format should be used for the preferences file, the 
> primary arguments being the former was cross-platform and the latter 
> was much easier on a Mac. If the preferences code was properly 
> modular, it would have been possible to write a MacOS-specific plist 
> loader and an XML loader for everything else. And what if we want to 
> use something like Quicktime, which is probably far more powerful than 
> SDL's media handlers? Or Direct3D on Windows?

A correction to the issue of plists.

Folks were looking to redo the preferences in XML. My suggestion of XML 
specification was for plists. (I wasn't even suggesting using the OSX 
APIs to access these files!) This would have been a cross-platform and 
XML-based preferences file with the additional bonus that under OSX 
there were tools to read/write plists *outside* of A1.

As an additional bonus, plists aren't tied to the needs of any one 
program. So if one platform needed an extra preferences item, it could 
add it without requiring additional XML tags and code in A1.

....

How fascinating.

You know where the MML vs PLIST XML preferences came up? April 2002.
What did it arise from? The accursed preferences related assert bug
What was done? Loren redid the preferences in a custom XML format.
When were we still finding the accursed assert? October, 2002

Now I'm pretty sure the preferences were changed to XML and released 
(With fun havok there since that also was a sudden change and I don't 
remember any preferences converting code as being part of the deal...) 
So this must have been old AlephOne versions floating around without us 
thinking about it.

-Jeremy Parsons