Re: How do I switch to Sawfish??

[Ali Akcaagac <ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de>]

On Mon, 2002-09-02 at 13:28, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > then i don't get out much information.
> 
> Ultimately one of the big programming skills - after patience and a
> commitment to getting it right - is being able to help yourself and
> read headers.

yeah i know i recently did this with gtkhtml2. i also did stuff like
this the years back when i was in top form doing mc680x0 assembly
programming. doing reverse engineering of code etc. but sometimes you
don't have much time and need to do stuff quickly. the fast growing and
changing libraries as the gnome ones really require better
documentation.

> > it opens and you need to unref things but there is no where
> > mentioned what unrefing means in detail.
> 
>       So - drill down; read the code:
> 
>       gnome-vfs/libgnomevfs/gnome-vfs-uri.c:
> 
>       It even has a doc section that explains it:

yes, this was of course an example of mine, not well choosen but now i
could come up and argue, so if i unref until the counter reaches zero
then can i use GnomeVFSURI as a kind of stack ? like stacking refcounts
on it. now how will you answer if you don't know nothing about it. you
will be able to answer (as part of the one who wrote the library).

> As are manuals with examples; _But_ there is enough example code out
> there, that uses gnome-vfs-uris to sink a battleship. The trick  is to
> have confidance and to read it, and learn. If you learn how to learn,
> you'll be twice as good as the next guy that wants to be spoon-fed
> small example fragments he can type in from some paper manual.

yes that's right, you learn how others did it. it doesn't tell if you
have done it right afterwards because you only copy how they did it.

example:

gnome_vfs_async_read ()

we all know that when doing a normal (non async) read () the data will
get loaded in one rush into the memory. e.g. file is 200kb size. you
open it, you read the file in all the 200kb in one rush into the buffer.

now the async read somehow behaves differently it only loads in some kb
at one time e.g. 2kb, then calls it callback recurses into the read
again until it has read in all 200kb (till you get the FAIL). i found
out about this by reading the testprogramms since the API ref manual
doesn't come up with readable information. i read the gconf & gnomevfs
introduction written by hallski but that was all about it. still
questions left open like. why is it reading only 2k chunks until it's
done. it could also load the whole stuff as one in it's own thread.

> I must say, the bonobo documentation is among the worst out there ;-)
> I'm pretty ashamed by the level of coverage of libbonobo[ui] etc.

yes but it was better than nothing.

oki i don't want to nail you down with these examples now but i want to
point out in general that there are always questions open where you need
answers too. you for example are quite good into that stuff because you
learned the api from ground up over time but now get yourself into the
situation where you need to learn the api. you can guess what these
functions are meant to do, you can investigate into the types, structs,
reverse engineer the function itself. if you do this with one library
then it may be ok but if you need to do this with all gnome libs then
you have a dirty way to go. you spent and investigate more into learning
the libraries and need to guess why are things the way they are than
writing your own application.

just my 0.2 cents.

-- 
Name....: Ali Akcaagac
Status..: Student Of Computer & Economic Science
E-Mail..: mailto:ali akcaagac stud fh-wilhelmshaven de
WWW.....: http://www.fh-wilhelmshaven.de/~akcaagaa