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

[Byrial Jensen]

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