Hi All,
it become more and more difficult for 3-rd party products developers
to fight with differences between Harbour and xHarbour and between
versions of the same compiler.
Just a couple of examples.
1) At() - hb_At() issue in Harbour. As a result now we have At() in
xHarbour and in official Harbour distribution, which accept 4
parameters, At() in new Harbour code, which accepts only 2 and
hb_At() in new Harbour, accepting 4 parameters, which is absent in
xHarbour and in older Harbour.
The only decision I've found to get a code, working with ALL
versions, is to duplicate hb_At() with a new name in my code ( HwGUI,
Leto db server ).
2) Recently the base workarea structure was changed in xHarbour. You
know that every RDD have it's own workarea structure with first
fields from a basic and some other, specific for this RDD, after the
basic, and this structure is kept in a new header file.
Now, if I want to keep the Leto RDD working for both Harbour and
xHarbour, it's latest and previous versions, I need to provide two
header files and leave a note for users of latest xharbour to rename
xrddleto.h to rddleto.h before compiling the RDD.
I understand and agree that such kind of changes is unavoidable and
suggest the following:
1) Introduce a [x]Harbour internal version number, at least, at C
level for to be possible to use constructions like
#if HARBOUR_VERSION >= 188
and increment this number after every change, which may require
changes in 3-rd party code ( not 3-rd party only, end applications,
too ).
2) Try to do such changes together with other changes of this type
for to have too much version numbers.
3) Create a special log in [x]Harbour repository for such changes -
for people could know what they need to correct and don't spend hours
looking the root of a problem.
4) It would be nice to introduce such version number and appropriate
pp possibilities on Harbour level, too.
I ask xHarbour developers, who read this list, to discuss the
possibility to introduce such a C level version number - for now, at
least, in hbapirdd.h, something like #define WORKAREA_VERSION NNN, to
be possible for 3-rd party RDD creators to write in new RDD structure
definition:
#ifdef __XHARBOUR__
#if WORKAREA_VERSION >= NNN
USHORT uiFieldHidden; /* Total number of fields hidden */
#endif
#endif
It's not my only problem, the same is for other RDD's - Mediator, for
example.
Regards,
Alexander
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