annotate PROGRAMMING_NOTES @ 8378:2b68c423357e

[gaim-migrate @ 9105] " For people and systems which have libzephyr installed (e.g Debian), this will allow the zephyr plugin to optionally be linked against it, instead of building and linking in the libzephyr that comes with gaim. Why? 1) A gaim binary package can be compiled against a locally installed libzephyr.a, and use either unkerberized or kerberized zephyr depending on which version of the zephyr shared libraries is installed. 2) It reduces the build speed and size of the zephyr plugin (on Debian x86, from 6.5 MB to ~ 300 kb) Also, I added a zephyr icon (a blue Z), that's similar to the icons used by Windows and MacOS zephyr clients at MIT." --Arun A Tharuvai someone will have to tell me how to fix the win32 makefiles, and i'm not sure he patched enough to get his icon to be actually used. committer: Tailor Script <[e-mail]>

Notes on keeping GAIM OS independant
------------------------------------

General
-------
- Use G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S and G_DIR_SEPARATOR for paths

- Use g_getenv, g_snprintf, g_vsnprintf

- Use gaim_home_dir instead of g_get_home_dir or g_getenv("HOME")

- Make sure when including win32dep.h that it is the last header to
  be included.

- Open binary files when reading or writing with 'b' mode.

  e.g: fopen("somefile", "wb");

  Not doing so will open files in windows using defaut translation mode. 
  i.e. newline -> <CR><LF>

Paths
-----

- DATADIR, LOCALEDIR & LIBDIR are defined in wingaim as functions.
  Doing the following will therefore break the windows build:

  printf("File in DATADIR is: %s\n", DATADIR G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S "pic.png");

  it should be:

  printf("File in DATADIR is: %s%s%s\n", DATADIR, G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S, "pic.png");

- When writing out paths to .gaimrc, use wgaim_escape_dirsep. This is necessary
  because the Windows dir separator '\' is being used to escape characters, when
  paths are read in from the .gaimrc file.

PLUGINS & PROTOS
----------------

- G_MODULE_EXPORT all functions which are to be accessed from outside the
  scope of its "dll" or "so". (E.G. gaim_plugin_init)

- G_MODULE_IMPORT all global variables which are located outside your
  dynamic library. (E.G. connections)

  (Not doing this will cause "Memory Access Violations" in Win32)