Re: [XBoard-devel] Hi from a new member of the xboard team

[Byrial Jensen]

Den 19-12-2011 00:35, Tim Mann wrote:
> Hi, Byrial. Welcome to the team.
>
> You have hit on some of the reasons I got tired of working on
> xboard/WinBoard years ago.  :-)
>
> I did always try to fix warnings back when I was the main person working
> on it, and more recently have fixed a few more from time to time when I
> make some little contribution. Are you enabling more than -Wall, or is
> it just that more warnings have crept in since the last time I looked?
>
>    --Tim

Hi Tim

I have around 209 warnings with -Wall. Most of them are suggestions for 
parentheses in expressions.

With -Wall -Wextra I have 872 warnings. Most of the extras are warnings 
about unused parameters in functions, typically callback functions.

But there are also others around of various other types, which I will 
probably look into and remove.

-Byrial

> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Byrial Jensen <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
>
>     Hi
>
>     I am Byrial Jensen, and I recently joined the xboard team.
>
>     I have been a professional programmer. Among other things I have
>     used C to do server programming, but I don't have too much
>     experience with GUI programming - and I find all that X, Xt, and Xaw
>     stuff difficult to grasp.
>
>     I am also a member of the Danish language team, and my translation
>     of xboard to Danish and subsequent testing caused a number of bug
>     reports.
>
>     I don't know how much I will involve me with xboard, but I suppose
>     that I will mostly concentrate on testing and bug fixing.
>
>     I am not very impressed with the maintainability of the code:
>
>       - There is a lot numeric values for variables and function
>     arguments with special undocumented meanings. That makes the code
>     hard to read and understand.
>
>       - There is a lot of generic functions with handle many special
>     cases, with code pieces for each case woven into each other. That
>     makes it hard to understand what the functions really do for which
>     of the cases they handle.
>
>       - Many functions are too long and do too much.
>
>       - The is too few code comments. Specially I would like to see
>     descriptions of function interfaces.
>
>       - The code generates tons of compiler warnings if enabled. That
>     renders warnings useless to find real bugs. That's a pity because
>     many common errors i C which are syntactically correct can often
>     casue compile warnings.
>
>     I would like to improve on these things. However if I make
>     non-functional changes to e.g. the master branch, it will make the
>     difference between the branches bigger, and it will be harder to
>     move code between branches. So I would like to hear your opinions on
>     this.
>
>     Best regards,
>     Byrial Jensen