21135 - libpref really needs to be cleaned up and made ownable

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Preferences: Backend, defect, P3)

Description

[Brendan Eich [:brendan]]

Get rid of prefapi.c, flatten and simplify, cull redundancy, clean up crappy
overindented control flow and capricious error checks and non-checks, reduce
hidden globals such as gGlobalConfigObject and gPrefConfigObject, etc.

Heck, evacuate the old modules/libpref and make prefs a new component under
xpfe, if that's where it belongs.  It doesn't seem top-level under mozilla/ to
me, but I could be missing something.

/be

Comment 1

[Alec Flett]

yeeeha! I've actually wanted to do this for a while.
First up: turning prefapi.c into prefapi.cpp so that we can use standard string
allocators. (this is done in my tree already)

The cleanup ought to take 2 days of work after the above change.

Comment 2

[Phil Peterson]

Sounds like great stuff, but not a beta stopper

Comment 3

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

spam: added self to cc list as this might affect my realm.

Comment 4

[leger]

Moving all libPref component bugs to new Preferences: Backend component.  
libPref component will be deleted.

Comment 5

[Alec Flett]

I have started some work on this.. I'm breaking nsIPref up into two interfaces:
nsIPrefService - the master manager of all global pref stuff - loading config
files, etc... contains stuff like startup(), readUserPrefsFile() etc...

nsIPrefBranch - represents a branch of the prefs hiearchy, such as "browser."
(and the there is a root pref branch at "") which can be cached by a particular
component that's using it.

Both of these will have proper interCaps APIs and CopyXXXPref will be renamed
getXXXPref()...

In the process, I have found a bunch (10+) methods of nsIPref that are never
used and really shouldn't be exposed through an API.

Comment 6

[Alec Flett]

not a beta stopper
I've done some cleanup to the interface already. I have stuff in my tree I'm
hoping to land in about two weeks.
I posted details to netscape.public.mozilla.prefs

Comment 7

[Paul MacQuiddy]

spam: moving qa contact on some bugs from paulmac to [e-mail]

Comment 8

[Alec Flett]

moving non-critical bugs to M20

Comment 9

[Alec Flett]

moving a few 0.9 bugs out to 1.0 to lighten my 0.9 load.

Comment 10

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

Bulk assigning bugs covered by the rewrite of nsPrefs to myself.

Comment 11

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

Bulk updating some fields and accepting

Comment 12

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

Marking this as a duplicate of Bug 46863 because all of this work is being done 
under that bug number.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 46863 ***

Comment 13

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

alecf has requested that I not dupe all these bugs, but rather close them as 
fixed after the work in bug 46863 has landed. Changing again...

Comment 14

[Brian Nesse (gone)]

This work was completed as part of the preferences API refactoring.

Comment 15

[sairuh (rarely reading bugmail)]

okay, rubberstamp.