Add "future trouble spots" section

This commit is contained in:
Andy McFadden 2015-01-13 14:10:39 -08:00
parent b3780261c4
commit 1d6736fd92

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@ -177,3 +177,42 @@ Files used when making a distribution, notably:
- the license and README files that are included in the installer
- redistributable Windows runtime libraries (only needed on WinXP?)
- NiftyList data file
Future Trouble Spots
--------------------
Microsoft generally does an excellent job of maintaining backward
compatibility, but as Windows and the build tools continue to evolve it is
likely that some things will break. The original version of CiderPress was
written to work on Win98, using tools of that era, and quite a bit of effort
in the 4.0 release was devoted to bringing CP into the modern era.
In another 15 years things may be broken all over again. Some areas of
particular concern:
1. File + folder selection. The dialog that allows you to select a combination
of files and folders is a customized version of the standard file dialog.
There is no standard dialog that works for this. The original version, based
on the old Win98-era file dialogs, worked fine at first but started to fail
in Vista. CiderPress v4.0 provided a new implementation, based on the
Win2K "explorer" dialog, which works well in WinXP and Win7/8. However,
WinVista introduced a new style, and those dialogs have a very different
structure (and don't work on WinXP). At some point it may be necessary
to replace the dialog again.
2. Help files. CiderPress initially used the old WinHelp system. v4.0
switched to the newer HtmlHelp, but judging by the level of support it would
seem that HtmlHelp is on its way out. The favored approach seems to be to
just pop open a web browser to a web site or a document on disk. The pop-up
help text, which currently comes out of a special section of the help file,
would instead use MFC tooltip features, with strings coming out of the
resource file. (This is probably more convenient and definitely more
flexible, so switching the pop-up help messages may happen sooner.)
3. Unicode filenames. CiderPress cannot open most files with non-ASCII,
non-CP-1252 characters in their names (e.g. kanji). This is because the
NufxLib and DiskImg libraries use narrow strings for filenames. The libraries
are expected to build on Linux, so converting them is a bit of a pain. At
some point it may be necessary to support Unicode fully. v4.0 did a lot of
code reorganization to make this easier, as did NufxLib v3.0.