Re: [anjuta-devel] GDL placeholder

[James Liggett <jrliggett cox net>]

Forwarding to anjuta-devel-list...

Hi Seb/Nacho,

On 05/03/2012 02:03 PM, Sébastien Granjoux wrote:
> Ok, so it makes sense to work on this library. Is your bug easily
> reproducible or is it something appearing only from time to time? I
> don't remember such thing in Anjuta.
I have a similar problem with git shell, where if you click on a command
button multiple times, the command panes don't get placed on the bottom
where they should be. They end up in the center instead, which looks
really odd. I have no idea why this happens.

Taking a broader view of the situation, now would be a good time to
start over with GDL. I'm not suggesting that we re-write everything, but
clearly a lot of GDL just doesn't make sense anymore. There have been
quite a few times where I've worked on (or tried to work on) GDL's code
base and wondered why things are done as they are. There's no
documentation anywhere, and the guy that wrote it is long gone so we
can't ask him.

I think it would help matters immensely if we tried a more formal
engineering approach with GDL. We could start by putting together a list
of things that GDL should do. Then we get rid of anything that doesn't
fit. This way, we have documented reasons for why certain things are in
the GDL code.

> From there, we should put together a short description of GDL's overall
design, with descriptions of which classes do what. The idea here is
that we document everything with GDL so that even long after we're gone,
other people can come in and understand how GDL works, and why we made
the decisions we did. From my experience, the absolute worst part of
hacking on GDL is that we have no idea how it works or how decisions
were made. Rectifying those problems would go a long way toward making
GDL more maintainable and easier to work on.

What does everyone think about this?

Thanks,
James