Further to
my previous
blog post on error-reporting in libgeda, I've made some pretty
good progress on implementing the ideas that I described. In
particular:
- The file opening functions (f_open()
and f_open_flags) now use GError to return error
messages rather than just spewing them to the console.
- gschem now shows an informative dialog box when it fails to load
a file.
- All programs now actually tell you the real reason for failing to
load a file (e.g. "Permission denied" or "File does
not exist") rather than just giving a generic "Could not
open file" message.
- The libgeda logging mechanism now handles most levels of GLib
log message rather than just the "message" level (seeing
as the log is most useful when some sort of error has occurred, this
seems sensible).
- gschem now highlights warnings and errors in the log
window.
- Lots of ways in which libgeda could randomly kill your program
have been eradicated.
These changes are not yet in the unstable branch, but barring
someone objecting to my changes I'll push them upstream tomorrow
sometime.
The next (probably thankless) task is to work through libgeda
converting all calls to directly output debugging/error-reporting
information to the console to use the GLib logging functions
instead, and to make log messages be sent at appropriate levels
rather than all at the "message" level (this will allow
filtering of log messages in the gschem log window, for
instance).
I'm still of two minds about the best way to do this. Currently,
libgeda defines a macro s_log_message() which is equivalent
to GLib's g_message(). For adding logging at multiple
levels, the two options are:
- Get rid of s_log_message entirely, and just use the
GLib logging macros directly.
- Define s_log_debug, s_log_warning etc so that
the exact implementation could be easily modified at a later date
(e.g. for the purpose of making libgeda always log in the
"libgeda" log domain).
I'm currently leaning towards the latter, but haven't as yet made
up my mind about exactly which will be the best way to go.
