Re: The "unstable" mcview

[Pavel Tsekov <ptsekov gmx net>]

Hello,

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005, Roland Illig wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> as you are aware after the last few mails, the current mcview is quite
> unstable, as I'm working actively on it.
>
> I have decided to do so (and not get every patch reviewed) because I
> think the viewer code needs to be cleared up in some parts. The review
> process would be just to time consuming.
>
> To catch most errors, I have added numerous assert() statements to the
> code to emphasize the preconditions I expect when certain functions are
> called.
>
> I (of course accidentally) introduced the bug in view_move_forward2()
> because this functions returns one of two completely unrelated values,
> one time the current offset, the other time the number of lines that
> have been advanced. Sorry for this, I will soon rewrite the function to
> have an additional parameter that splits this double-use of the return
> value.
>
> For the other bug that has been reported, I currently have too few
> information to tell the cause.
>
> I hope you are not completely disappointed of the bugs, and let me
> continue working on mcview.

No - but this development could happen on a branch and once you were
confident with the new code you could merge it in the main trunk. You have
done nearly 60 commits so far to viewer.c only for the last 3 weeks. I
don't think this is the right way to go - it could have been avoided if
you have come up with a final, well thought patch and eventually split it
into several chunks. Anyone unaware of what is going on and checking out
from CVS could get a broken viewer and start reporting bugs which you
would eventually correct or which are already fixed. We would have to
worry only about the viewer then. And also a bug that eventually showed
with pre-April view code may no longer be traceable.

You complain about the time it takes to review a patch. Well, have you
considered all the people who have posted to the list and didn't get their
patch reviewed ? I think it is kind of unfair the way you try to enforce
your vision of MC.

Anyway there is no way to turn the things back so what difference does it
make if we are disappointed or not ? Does it make you feel more
comfortable by posting messages of this kind ?