annotate PROGRAMMING_NOTES @ 7724:613b20c69d2c

[gaim-migrate @ 8369] this didn't cause me any problems yesterday, and it compiles, and bug fixing is a good thing. "Some month ago I introduced translatable texts for "gaim --help" and "gaim-remote --help". Unfortunately the output of the translated text is often unreadable. The problem is, that Gaim's *.po files have the UTF-8 locale (because this is the default charset for GTK+ 2.0). But the users may have configured other locales. For instance my SuSE Linux 9.0 system is configured with LANG=de_DE@euro. "euro" is ISO-8859-1 (Western character set, 8 Bit, with the Euro currency symbol). Lots of UTF-8 characters are unreadable if they are displayed in a 8 Bit charset without conversion. Only the 7 Bit chars are displayed right. There are two possible solutions: 1) Make the console texts untranslatable. This isn't very clever. 2) Convert the texts from UTF-8 to user's locale. I choose the second solution. The conversion cannot be made during the translation, because gettext does not allow a mix of different character sets in one po-file. My patch converts the console strings from UTF-8 to users locale. Normally this works right, because most users have a locale which is compatible with their language. The case where a user uses a language (for instance German: LANG=de_DE) with an incompatible character set (for instance the 7Bit charset LC_CTYPE=C) is also handled. The user then sees a warning and the original UTF-8 message. At first I tried to make a new UTF-8 function in src/util.c. But the function is needed 5 times in src/gaim-remote.c and 2 times in src/main.c. gaim-remote is not linked against util.o. Also there are a lot of dependencies from util.o to other files, so I will introduce a lot of trouble to link gaim-remote against util.o. So I only wrote a function in src/gaim-remote.c and used the UTF-8 conversion inline in src/main.c." --Bjoern Voigt 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)