Re: plans

[Christian Hopp]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Jan-Henrik Haukeland wrote:

> I have been thinking again :) When it comes to fixing the control file
> language I'm for it, but when it comes to refactor the code base I was
> wrong. Let me explain;
>
> 1) Refactoring and redesigning a code base like monit with 20K lines
>    of C code is to much work for us. And from what I have seen in other
>    open source projects (mostly in apache/jakarta) refactoring is most
>    likely to succeed if it's done by *one* developer. None of us have
>    time to do this, at least now. And to start something we cannot
>    finnish is not good because it is a waist of time and work.
>
> 2) The old saying "if it work don't fix it" is still true.

"Never change a running system!"  That how I think about it.

> What I propose instead is to do this INCREMENTALLY. That is, we do
> *NOT* start with a grand new architecture plan and reimplement
> everything. Instead we only refactor what we have to reimplement for
> Martin's new language proposal to work. But when we reimplement new
> stuff lets keep in mind the object oriented technique I proposed
> earlier and when possible extract stuff from the monitor.h interface
> and put it in a new header. This way we will refactor the code base
> gradually but with real progress and with always a working monit
> system in CVS.

But we have to do it bit by bit and we have to take care that we keep a
working code in the CVS.

> In short, lets just start with reimplementing the language and do
> refactoring only when it is necessary to implement new stuff.

+1

> This also means that we keep the current architecture and only change
> it when we really have to do so. The current architecture is still
> sort of an event driven architecture in that validate.c generate
> "events" which it dispatch to the various alert_xxx functions :)

And time is valuable to us... that's why we should take care that the
current implementation is in a good shape, that we implement those
features which are necessary and that we throw out whatever is
outdated.  We are too busy to reimplement everything.  And even though
the language seems messy the code is not all too bad.

CHopp

-- 
Christian Hopp                                email: address@hidden
Institut für Elektrische Informationstechnik             fon: +49-5323-72-2113
TU Clausthal, Leibnizstr. 28, 38678 Clausthal-Zellerf.   fax: +49-5323-72-3197
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