Re: Global Defaults (Re: Associating bundle directories with app)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 21 Jan 2011, at 16:05, Stefan Bidi wrote:

> I have a question on this, just out of curiosity...  What happens if two 
> different plist files in the GlobalDefault subdir assign a value to the same 
> default?  Which one is going to be taken?

It's undefined ... whichever happens to be the last one read (I already wrote 
that in the documentation) ... thats why GlobalDefaults.plist is merged in 
*after* the files in the subdirectory ... so you know the values specified 
there will take precedence.

> The example David gave is nice in theory, but what happens if two or more 
> different theme bundles want to be the default?

Really I think it's not a great example because individual packages *shouldn't* 
be setting defaults which control other code.  I would see individual package 
preferences as a way to set the defaults for that particular package (as 
opposed to hard-coding them in the package binaries).  Decisions about *which* 
package (eg which theme) to use should be made by the person in charge of the 
distribution as a whole.  eg. in the case of themes, the distributor would be 
responsible for ensuring that only one theme is made default within their 
distribution.  So GlobalDefaults.plist might set values for the entire 
distribution while GlobalDefaults/packagename.plist might set the defaults for 
a particular package.