Blog
The Current State of Scribe
Date: 23/2/2015
Tags: scribe
Maybe it's time to just bundle OpenSSL in Scribe? I'm thinking of statically linking it so that it's always available and there will never be any trouble with missing or mis-matched libraries. The downside is the download size will blow out a bit. Over 2 MiB for the Windows build, maybe even 3. Recently I've had a very bad time with people have all sorts of weird crashes, odd behaviour and connection issues. And it seems that these things are next to impossible to reproduce. Maybe it's the target market changing on me as the profile of the client gets higher.

One of those odd behaviours is Scribe not saving it's settings between sessions. I suspect this has to do with the install folder being write only, but the software thinking it's in portable mode (i.e. store settings in the install folder). I'd love for someone to be able to reproduce that and tell me how.

So I'm going to look into ways of avoiding pitfalls. I'm starting to think that making automatic crash reporting default to "on" is for the best. I'm simply not getting enough data to respond to problems.

The HTML editing functionality is coming along nicely. I managed to send quite a few HTML messages over the last few weeks. But it's still pretty flakey. And also there are some thorny issues to sort out. However it's a lot better than even a month ago so there is hope.

Also I finally fixed an old crash in the GWindow destructor on the Linux/GTK2 build. The other main sticking point there is the popup handling under the GTK2 platform isn't great. But I didn't see the point in tackling that when the software was still crashing all the time.

Edit: So I think I've worked out the procedure for the not being able to save your settings bug:
  • Install on Windows 8.1, user grants admin rights to installer.
  • Installer writes files to the install folder and then offers the user to start Scribe
  • If user starts Scribe, the installer runs Scribe.exe WITH ADMIN RIGHTS!
  • User selects "Portable" mode during Scribe's first run.
  • User configures some options and then exits Scribe. Scribe saves the options to the program files install folder and that works because it still has the ADMIN permissions from the installer.
  • User runs Scribe again... this time with USER permissions... and now Scribe can't write to the program files folder anymore... DUN DUN DAAAA!
Yeah I'm going to have to make sure that Scribe is aware that during startup that it may have ADMIN permissions, and not to assume it will be able to write to anything in the Program Files folder tree. However it should totally take advantage of having ADMIN rights to setup the registry for being the default client / registered client.
 
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