Re: About gsettings aborting on unkown schemas

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2011-05-27 at 17:09 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Man, how many times has this thread happened? At least fifty.
> 
> On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 10:57 AM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > try:
> >    load_some_extension()
> > except:
> >    warn("This extension sucks. I'm disabling it and moving on.")
> >
> > Of course, GLib is C. We don't have exceptions. We have GError,
> > which is a decent foundation for exceptions in language bindings.
> > But if we don't use it, then languages that could otherwise do
> > the right thing are screwed.
> 
> This is the core thing. People who expect no g_error/abort are used to
> languages with exceptions.
> 
> The thing that's different about C is that an "exception" (think
> GError) changes the function signature of that function... _and_ *all
> callers* in any library or app!

I really don't want to carry this thread much further. It
is getting bike-sheddy. We disagree. I'm not the one making
the decisions. Life goes on.

But I want to point out that my point was never that GLib
should behave like a language with exceptions. Just that
it should let bindings in those languages behave like they
should.

What I would do (take it or leave it, and let's move on with
our lives) is make the constructor return NULL if there's a
problem and make all consumers of GSettings abort if passed
NULL. Same effect, just perhaps delayed. I don't think it
risks any more data loss than the current behavior.

The advantage is that bindings could do a NULL check and
raise an exception. With introspection-based bindings, this
kind of NULL-check-and-raise can even be done automatically,
perhaps with a flag like raise-on-null.

--
Shaun