Proposal (and yes, I'm willing to do stuff!): Must Use More Macros

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2009 at 1:18 PM, Joe Nall<joe at nall.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 5, 2009, at 1:57 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 14:40 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>>>
>>> On Fri, 2009-06-05 at 10:31 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> It seems to me it'd make sense to convert all these kinds of snippets
>>>> into macros. Am I right, or is there a reason against doing this?
>>>>
>>>
>>> When this was discussed for the example of GConf schemas in the
>>> packaging committee a few weeks ago, there was quite a bit of pushback
>>> about 'obscure macros' hiding whats really going on...
>>
>> Honestly, that just sounds silly. It's not obscuring things, it's a
>> sensible level of abstraction and reuse.
>>
>> I suspect you'd have trouble selling that position to developers -
>> "instead of calling functions from obscure external libraries, just copy
>> and paste the code from them into every single app you build!" I don't
>> think that'd go down a storm. ;)
>
> Libraries have well defined error handling. Macros can get pretty mysterious
> when they start failing. Poor analogy.
>

???  There are tons of bugs I have dealt with where a library has gone
off into some mysterious way that didn't follow defined error
handling.

-- 
Stephen J Smoogen. -- BSD/GNU/Linux
How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed
in a naughty world. = Shakespeare. "The Merchant of Venice"