Re: [gnome-love] Am I doing this right?

[Elijah P Newren <newren math utah edu>]

Hi,

I looked at it briefly.  Comments below.

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 14:36, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
> ethan zimmerman wrote:
>
> > I've written a simple GNOME program using libglade, and I'm wondering if
> > I did it right. I would really appreciate ANY comments about the
> > following program (see link below). The things I'm most interested in
> > are "source code style" things. (written standards, unwritten rules,
> > variable and widget naming schemes, etc.).

You didn't provide quick access keys for your confirmation window.  If
you change the "Quit" and "Cancel" labels to "_Quit" and "_Cancel", then
gtk+ automatically transforms that into Quit and Cancel with Alt+q and
Alt+c as quick access keys.

Also, I found it somewhat strange that you end all comments at column
78.  I haven't seen any Gnome guideline against that but that might just
be because I've never seen anyone else do it.

Next, I noticed that you have the return values for functions on the
same line as the function name.  I don't know if there's a guideline for
this or not, but all the Gnome programs I am familiar with put the
return value on a separate line before the function name (at least for
definitions; for declarations they tend to be on the same line).

> Took a quick look and noticed that you are not following the GNOME 
> indentation scheme (8 chars). There is a document describing 
> "guidelines" for GNOME code, of course in the end it's up to you but 
> following those guidelines will make others feel comfortable helping out 
> on your module:
>  
> http://developer.gnome.org/doc/guides/programming-guidelines/book1.html

Note that indentation does vary among Gnome programs, but there are two
that are the more-or-less standards.  The slightly more common one is
the one Mikael pointed out.  The other one is the Gtk+ style of
indentation (with 2 spaces), which is used by programs/libraries such as
Gtk+ (obviously) or Metacity.  So your program does follow the latter
convention.

> Also, noticed:
>
> {
>  g_print("prefs \n");
>
>  GladeXML *prefs_defs;
>  GtkWidget *widget;
> }
>
> this isn't valid and you should first declare your variables in each 
> block. Otherwise it seemed fine so far!

This is important to keep in mind with older compilers, but it is
actually valid C as of C99.  See, for example, 
http://www.comeaucomputing.com/techtalk/c99/#mixeddecls  (the first link
Google found for me; yes gcc supports this--see
http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.3/c99status.html).


Cheers,
Elijah