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
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