[vlc-devel] [RFC] Resetting VLC's preferences for the Mac users during the 2.0.2 release

[Felix Paul Kühne]

Hi Rémi,

On 16.04.2012, at 10:27, Rémi Denis-Courmont wrote:

> On Sun, 15 Apr 2012 22:19:37 +0200, Felix Paul Kühne
> <fkuehne.videolan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Kevin Dean traced that down to the control intf option, which is
> sometimes
>> set (for whatever reason) to "macosx". That's definitely a bad idea.
> 
> The same problem existed with Qt4 (commit
> 727b24988dd766eac2f8a63f93cf841aba826a92).

Thanks for digging in the archives. I wasn't aware of that and will add some similar code to the Mac interface.

> This highlights just how bad our (lack of) QA process is.
> Firstly, that code should never have been written or committed, and never
> blindly copied from Qt (or Wx?) to MacOS.
I didn't. In fact, that code isn't running on the Mac and I have no idea why there's a significant number of users with broken preferences. A few of them told me that they enabled it on their on in the advanced preferences, because they thought it was reasonable to enable the macosx intf on macosx...

> Secondly, platform-specific fixes should be reviewed for applicability to
> other platforms, especially Linux and Qt=Linux+Windows fixes.
> Unfortunately, I do not see who's going to have the time, the skill set and
> the motivation.
Indeed, but that's a more general problem.


>> Since this scares away quite a few users, I'd suggest to re-enable the
>> "delete old preferences" mechanism included in the Mac interface code.
> 
> Hmm? we did not reset preferences for this bug on Linux and Windows. 
> Clearing the preferences is going to annoy a lot of OTHER users!
True. It might be wiser to just check the "control" and "intf" on the first launch of VLC 2.0.2.


> Any UI but
> the MacOS GUI barely works on MacOS anyway, due to the totally fucked up
> threading.
Well, you can use Qt, but nobody is going to do that because I don't compile this interface for distribution packages.

>> At present, users upgrading from VLC 0.8.6 and earlier will be presented
>> with a box telling them that VLC found old preferences and would like to
>> delete them. The user can decide to do so or go on at his own risk.
> 
> You cannot detect the VLC version of vlcrc. It's not saved in the file.

You are not aware of yet another hack we included in the Mac port:
Starting with VLC 0.9.0, we store "VLCPreferencesFileVersion" = 1 in VLC's Mac-specific preferences file org.videolan.vlc.plist. Upgrading the "file version" requirement to 2 will trigger a reset automatically. Anyway, I'll go for the softer way hinted above.

Thanks for the feedback!


Best regards,

Felix