Re: questions about conventions for GUI preferences

[John W. Eaton]

On 10/25/19 11:37 AM, Torsten Lilge wrote:

> The reason why I started to exchange the literals by symbolic constants
> for key names and default values was to prevent typos in the "hard
> wired" strings which already led to one or two bug reports in the pasts.
>
> I only added symbolic constants in cases where I was working on the
> related preferences anyways. That's why we currently have this mixture.
>
> I really vote for changing all still existing literals into symbolic
> constants for the reasons that have already mention in your mail (in the
> last paragraph, did you mean "With literal strings, ...")? If this is
> the common opinion here, I would raise the priority of this issue and
> work on this for the next time.

Thanks for the feedback and explanation about the reasons for the 
current situation.

Yes, I meant to say

With literal strings used for the keys, it's easier to know exactly what 
the key is without having to search but it's harder to ensure that there 
aren't any typos in the names and harder to change the name of a key. 
Not that it matters too much, because it is already hard to change the 
name if you want to preserve backward compatibility with preference 
files from previous versions.

Let's continue to move toward using symbolic names then.  I don't think 
we need to make the change all at once.  I can help with the changes.

Thanks,

jwe