FreeLists / haiku-appserver / [haiku-appserver] Re: purpose of libappserver.so

["Axel Dörfler" <axeld@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"DarkWyrm" <bpmagic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > How about drawing those previews inside the app_server into a 
> > BBitmap 
> > Appearance has passed to it? At least I don't see the necessity for 
> > the way it's done now.
> That would require a significant amount of code to do so. The drawing 
> functions in the DefaultDecorator, for example, take a little over 
> 200 
> lines of code. Big deal. The BeHat decorator (not currently in the 

Why would you want to do that? Why not just have the app_server use 
this display driver to draw into the bitmap buffer provided by 
Appearance?
I don't see a problem with this, nor much work.

[...]
> This is almost all of the files in the library itself. Additionally, 
> the private API for system cursors is kept in the library and will be 
> also used by Appearance at some future time. You could say that 
> Appearance is our equivalent of Be's ScrollBar preferences app - it 
> has 
> a tendency to break the general protocol followed by most preferences 
> apps because it's using a private API and it tweaks things handled by 
> the app_server itself.

Well, private APIs are one thing and fine, but I think this is another 
case, as both, app_server and Appearance link against this library. 
What would the app_server do with this private API?

> The decorators themselves also link against libappserver. There was a 
> time when Appearance and the window decorators had their own copies 
> of 
> the sources that they needed, but it was hard to keep them in sync 
> because of the multiple copies in the tree. It also speeds up build 
> time because there are half as many files to link whenever you're 
> working on something like the ServerWindow class because none of the 
> foundation classes have been changed, and while you could just have 
> the 
> decorators and Appearance link against the app_server itself, I think 
> that's more hackish than what's in place. I hope this clears things 
> up 
> for you. :)

Why not just link the decorators against the app_server, then? That's 
the usual way to deal with add-ons.

Bye,
   Axel.