annotate PROGRAMMING_NOTES @ 5842:dbed8c87f750

[gaim-migrate @ 6273] Another reason not to use CVS. This saves your buddy icons to the OSCAR servers (I hope). It's not fully tested and it may screw things up, but I wanted to get it in CVS so other people can try to break this, and KingAnt can review my work (that libfaim wizard that he is.) Don't use CVS. I'd like to thank Christian Hammond, for his work on the account and prpl APIs that made it so easy to add the hook into buddy icon changing. I'd like to thank Mark Doliner for laying most of the groundwork and for his kind words of encouragement. I'd like to thank myself for making the buddy icon selector real sexy-like. I'd like to thank the Lord almighty for giving me the strength to do this. I promised myself I wouldn't cry. I never imagined I'd be committing this. 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)