Chris wrote: > To what little I understand, I agree completely that changes were > good. But from the FlightGear perspective, one could have imagined > different ways of dealing with old-style config files. For example, one > could have imagined a parser which detected the config file style, and > acted differently on that basis -- anywhere from screaming about the old > file's format and warning that it'll probably stop working with the next > version, to encouraging the user to look into getting an updated config, > to pointing the user to the conversion software so they can try it > themselves, to having the user stand by while config file style conversion > was attempted right then in an automated fashion -- all things I've seen > other applications do when faced with this situation. We just broke the > old files, and while that should nudge developers who hadn't yet > reacted to the warnings about the config file changes, it also was > probably rough on a few users, who found that planes they enjoyed suddenly > didn't work anymore.
Good suggestions. There are places I've tried to "catch" obvious problems, but it doesn't always work. One of those places is the configuration file version number. What is supposed to happen is that when an old configuration file is read, the new code is supposed to inform the user what is wrong. Sometimes it doesn't work as well as it could. Anyhow, I'll keep this in mind and maybe I can add some of these suggestions. But, I have noticed that sometimes when error messages are sent to the console, the user doesn't look for those, anyhow. SimGear also hides the messages that JSBSim normally puts out to prevent the user from being inundated with messages. At a time like this, users may want to turn on some of those messages, or some of them should bypass the SimGear message handling mechanism. (?) Jon ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Flightgear-devel mailing list Flightgear-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/flightgear-devel
