For context: The »Advice System« was coined a long time ago, in 2010,
based on the vague impression that it might be useful for that kind of application
we are about to build here. And, as can be expected, none of the usage situations
envisioned at that time was brought to bear. Non the less, the facility came in
handy at times, precisely because it is cross-cutting and allows to pass
information without imposing any systematic relationship between the
communication partners.
And now we've got again such a situation.
The global style manager in the UI has to build a virtual CSS path,
which is needed by drawing code somewhere deep down, and we absolutely
do not want to pass a reference to the style manager over 20 recursive calls.
The alternatives would be
(1) to turn the style manager into a public service
(2) to have a static access function somewhere
(3) to use a global variable.
For rationale, (1) would be overblown, because we do not actually request
a service to do work for us, rather we need some global piece of information.
(2) would be equivalent to (1), just more confusing. And (3) is basically
what the Advice system does, with the added benefit of a clear-cut service
access point and a well defined lifecycle.
This changeset adds the ability to check if actual Advice has been published,
which allows us to invoke the (possibly expensive) GTK path building and
style context building code only once.
the (trivial) implementation turned out to be correct as written,
but it was (again) damn challenging to get the mulithreaded chaotic
test fixture and especially the lambda captures to work correct.
without that check, in theory our test runner will tolerate
a non-zero return value, like throwing or failing an assert,
which is not what we want....
guess these happenend to get in by forgetting to
add this check when switching a test from PLANNED to TEST
- the tests covering threadind support and object monitors
are located in the backend test-library and linked against liblumierabackend.so
- some fundamental facilities of proc-layer moved from the library tree
into the basic components tree, since *testing* them requires at least
to link against liblumieracommon.so
