Re: [Gnu3dkit-dev] Documentation Project

[Brent Gulanowski]

On Friday, October 11, 2002, at 01:38  AM, Philippe C.D. Robert wrote:

> Hi,
>
> this is maybe a very good idea. To finally make some progress again, I 
> planned to upload all header files to the CVS (including empty 
> implementations maybe) so that you see my ideas. I would then fill in 
> the code which would come from 0.3 ASAP. But unfortunately there are 
> still some issues with the design which are not yet finalised, ie the 
> new camera design to name one.
>
> I hesitate taking the old 0.3.x tree, adding the new files as is to 
> let everyone working on it, because I think this would turn out to be 
> a little messy - I'd rather have a simple version to start with (that 
> is no graph optimisation, GL optimisations etc.), so that the design 
> is understandable by anyone and that design flaws are detected early!
>
> What do you think?
If the design is significantly different, then this makes perfect sense 
to me. It doesn't mean that you're throwing out existing work, but that 
old code will have to be inspected carefully as it is deemed 
appropriate and added in. I believe it is ideal to start with the 
external headers for any project, whether you are a top-down 
design-first person (like me) or an XP person. I may change my tune 
after a few years, but it seems to me that for a library, you usually 
have some idea how it is going to be used first, so creating the API 
that is exposed first will get you thinking in terms of the services 
being offered and how best to represent them, instead of worrying about 
how they are implemented.

The main argument I've heard against this is that you might think you 
are going to do something and find you can't do it later, or it has to 
be done in a completely different way. I think this is more a problem 
with C when you pass a lot of primitive type arguments around, as 
opposed to Objective-C where you are passing mostly objects. You have 
more experience, so you decide.

As for optimisations, certainly you don't have to worry about those 
yet. Start with the design, and modify as appropriate. Because we 
already have a base of working code, we can look at that for reference 
and/or cut&paste. And we have more than 3DKit v0.3 to look at for 
fine-grain programming. If we get to a point where we can assign 
sections of code to specialize in, each specialist would be advised to 
look at other available implementations for insights, especially other 
LGPL projects. That much of it is written in C++ might be a problem, 
but if I don't have to re-invent the wheel... unless it's fun!

BTW, did any of my speculations of the graph organization have an 
applicable value?

--
Brent Gulanowski                                address@hidden

There are only two industries that refer to their customers as "users".
     -Edward Tufte