Re: [Alephmodular-devel] Preferences progress update 12/03/03

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

On Dec 3, 2003, at 11:57 AM, Timothy Collett wrote:

>> Thoughts? Comments? Perhaps I should take flag based arguments and 
>> split them all out into bools?
>>
>
> I'd say no, leave them as flags, but document it very well, so that 
> it's easy for anyone who understands binary flags to tell what each 
> bit means.  Makes it more concise.

Well, I'm working on preferences for a few reasons. Including clarity 
and future proofing. Up to this point in time, I've been very careful. 
I've tried to do *nothing* that changes the preferences format. Now 
however, I'm trying to do one set of changes that can read the existing 
preferences (for all of the two people who've actually downloaded and 
run AM) and can read/write the new structure.

While some things are being handled as raw data, they are mostly 
platform specific elements. I suppose it's debatable on the keycodes 
(And I should do some playing with keycodes as a char string just to 
flesh out encoding a string as XML.)

Anyhow, if you want to manually tweak flags, would you rather them be a 
concise number and doing the math? Or just entering a key for the flag 
in the preferences file and using TRUE or FALSE as values?

I'm leaning towards expanding the flags out in the preferences.

> Also, just to be random, perhaps a good first test of the modularity 
> of AlephModular would be to take the preferences module out and make a 
> little preferences editor.

I debated it, like a standalone preference converter. But even there, 
the only active preference reader is the CPreferencesReader_Wad class, 
which requires the unmodularized wad code.

And of course, the end goal is being able to read/write a plist xml 
file without using MacOS X's CF API for doing so.

There might also be interest in trying to use CPreferences within A1 as 
well. Though I'm a little unsure how to reconcile A1 FileDesc and 
associated calls with AM's CFileDesc and kin.

-Jeremy Parsons