Re: [Gnu-arch-users] "librifying" libarch

[Colin Walters]

On Mon, 2003-10-20 at 12:55, Tom Lord wrote:

>    Leave the invariants alone, but otherwise, if any of the -utils can
>    exit (by panic, exit, or a safe_* call), change them to return an
>    error value and update callers.

GLib has a nice thing called GError that is a good way to write things
like this.  The GError structure itself is actually quite simple:

struct _GError
{
  GQuark       domain;
  gint         code;
  gchar       *message;
};

domain and code just give a programmatic way to know which layer raised
an error; in OO languages this would be equivalent to the class of the
exception.

The main thing about GError is that it's also a *protocol* that has to
be followed inside libraries and by clients using those libraries.  It
provides a clean way to know when an error occurred, and also to ignore
errors if you like.

I suggest that if someone takes on the task of switching libarch to
propagating errors, they design an error framework along these lines.
Here's the documentation for GError:

http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/glib-Error-Reporting.html

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