How to continue

[David Philippi]

Now that I've finished my primary goal of getting Pingus to compile in a more 
reasonable time and reducing the header dependencies to a point where the 
Doxygen documentation starts to get useable again, I've got to answer the 
question what to do next...
There are still some easy cleanup task to do:

- changing member objects to pointers to allow further reduction of header 
  dependencies - affects compile time performance, Doxygen documentation
  and opens the way to delayed initialization of members to improve runtime
  performance

- moving member initialization from constructor body to initialization list -
  improves runtime performance and sepperates the different taks of a 
  constructor

- changing parameter passing by value to const reference - improves runtime
  performance

- write more Doxygen documentation - guess what it's good for ;-)

- identify obsolete headers in .cc files (I'll probably write a script to do   
  this)

Those tasks have two disadvantages in common:

1. They won't be visible to the user of Pingus (except marginal performance 
    improvements)
2. I don't know wheter doing this work really helps anyone or if it's useless

So I'd like to hear which areas of Pingus need cleanup most or what other 
tasks exist which don't require an understand of the whole layout (I'll be 
getting a sound card soon, then I may continue the work on the sound code).
This way I could be quite sure that may work really does help someone. It's 
probably quite easy to see that this would increase my motivation quite a 
bit...
I'll continue to work on the task mentioned above, since a cleanup of the 
code is IMO a mayor prerequisite of attracting more developers to Pingus and 
having more fun while working on Pingus.
I don't like the idea of seeing the development of Pingus coming to a full 
stop because no one is motivated to work on the code anymore. Since there's 
no one else to do the job, the remaining developers will have to motivate 
each other in order to prevent this.

Therefore I call everyone to write more on this list:

- if you're happy with a change made by someone, write it on the list. If I
  read a praise to someone else I may be motivated to outperform him :-)
- if you have some ideas, post them even if they are vague - perhaps 
  someone else has just the missing bit you didn't even know you searched for
- if you start to work on something, post it so that the other people know 
   where work's going on
- if you encounter bugs or bad code which you don't want to fix right now 
  make them known and someone else may lend you help

Bye David