annotate PROGRAMMING_NOTES @ 16364:a5a64fcad0ca

Kill the libpurpleperl hack library and move the init stuff to perl.so itself. This works fine for me and I'm hoping will work fine on Solaris as well. When it gets tested we'll want to drop libpurpleperl.c but until I know it works I don't want to drop it (because of mtn's die die dir merge stuff).

Notes on keeping Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple OS independant
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General
-------
- Use G_DIR_SEPARATOR_S and G_DIR_SEPARATOR for paths

- Use g_getenv, g_snprintf, g_vsnprintf

- Use purple_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 default translation mode. 
  i.e. newline -> <CR><LF>

Paths
-----

- DATADIR, LOCALEDIR & LIBDIR are defined as functions in the win32 build
  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");

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

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