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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: meinproc4 on Mac, KLocale (was Re: What to test for 4.13?)
From:       Ian Wadham <iandw.au () gmail ! com>
Date:       2014-04-19 6:15:04
Message-ID: 982BD803-0583-4661-8B42-7100CD60B513 () gmail ! com
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On 18/04/2014, at 4:58 AM, Thomas Lübking wrote:

> On Donnerstag, 17. April 2014 20:32:17 CEST, Luigi Toscano wrote:
> > Ian Wadham ha scritto:
> > 
> > > Sorry it has been such a while since you wrote.  A lot of water has
> > > flowed under the bridge since then, but this issue is still of the utmost
> > > importance to MacPorts.  See:
> > > https://trac.macports.org/wiki/KDEProblems/KDETickets ...
> > 
> > Thanks for looking into it, just to question here:
> > - did you try to just disable that line? It's certainly less "breaking" than
> > try to rewrite a tool where locale support have been rewritten in KF5.
> 
> If removing the KLocale() constructor avoids it, i'm fairly sure it will be the \
> bogus CFStringGetLength call, so to me it would seem more reasonable to protect \
> convert_CFString_to_QString 
> kdelibs/kdecore/kernel/kkernel_mac.cpp
> -----------
> 
> QString convert_CFString_to_QString(CFStringRef str) {
> +    if (str == NULL) {
> +        return QString();
> +    }
> 
> eventually print a warning (while i've no idea what this condition implies, like \
> eg. a broken setup. It could be a bug in CFStringRef or CFLocaleGetValue or either \
> isn't re-entrant or whatever)

That is undoubtedly worth doing, but might not solve the whole problem.
See my reply to Luigi.  Briefly, this is where the crash was in the only
backtrace we have ever had. There might be other crash-points.

> And no, forking the application seems the worst option (remember Ian, you'd have to \
> maintain that fork ;-)

Not in my philosophy, Horatio … :-)

Of course, if I made such a change I would take responsibility for it for as long as
I am able, but what then?  I am getting rather old now …

In my philosophy, also in the salaried part of the computer industry and FAIK in free
products like Firefox, maintenance is a *group* responsibility.  It has been so since
the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is backed up by standards about \
"maintainability" which, if followed, allow anybody to pick up anybody else's code \
and maintain it.  In fact, maintenance can then become what KDE calls a "junior job". \
If you do well at it, you can become a developer … :-)  In the bad old days, people \
often used to quit an organisation and leave behind unfinished, buggy or unreadable \
code, which caused major grief for their successors ...

A few times I have been contacted by an organisation for which I used to work and \
have always, as a professional, provided whatever advice I could --- and for free.  \
But it was clear that the maintenance responsibility lay with my former group, not \
with me.

Lecture over … :-)

Cheers, Ian W.




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