Re: Where now?

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From: Piers Cawley
Subject: Re: Where now?
Date: 20:53 on 22 Oct 2003
Steve Purkis <spurkis@xxxxx.xxx> writes:

> On Wednesday, October 22, 2003, at 04:04  pm, Mark Fowler wrote:
>
>> Okay, so the question is, where are we heading now?
>
> Good question.  I did post a short-term plan last week which I'll get
> started on in my copious amounts of spare time, but AFAIK there are no
> plans further than that.  Not for lack of ideas, mind you... I've
> submitted quite a few patches in the past, and I know Piers has a
> whole stack of them tucked away somewhere.  But as far as I'm
> concerned Piers is still the lead developer on this project - I've got
> the go-ahead to do maintenance, but aside from that I think we need
> some feedback from Piers before we can decide which way to go.

The current problem with Pixie, as I see it, is that the locking
stuff isn't working very well at all, and without locking Pixie is
very limited.

I can't remember if we've fixed the object graph stuff to use a
separate table yet (and if we haven't, we should do...). 

Other plans include getting rid of a few more of the case statements
that work on the reftype of the object, and switch to using
polymorphic dispatch with Heritable::Types instead.

There's also a case to be made for unbundling Pixie::Info as it's a
handy tool for other things as well I think.

>> I can't really do much on Pixie development, it being a little over
>> my head atm, but what I'd really like to do is start adding
>> comments to the Pixie source code, and maybe working on the
>> documentation.
>>
>> Does this sound like a good idea?  What's the best way for me to go
>> about this.  Obviously, I'd really like someone to be checking my
>> working to make sure my comments aren't completely wrong.
>
> I think adding some Pod is a good idea,

More Pod is always a good idea, documenting how to use the bloody thing.

> but I'd go easy on the comments - I know for a fact James prefers
> self-documenting code, and I assume Piers does too as his code is
> quite readable. 

Why thank you. Generally my gut feeling is that every time I think
"Maybe I should add a comment here?" I'd be better off working out
what it is about the code that is hard to understand and rewriting it
so it's clear. Admittedly, there are a couple of places where Perl
makes that very hard to do (I'm thinking particularly of the code
that does the Data::Dumper -> exec tricks, which uses dynamic scoping
in slightly weird ways).

> Maybe some design docs would be a better idea?  I'm more than happy
> to go over things with you, time permitting.  But bear in mind I'm
> still learning too.

I've been meaning to write something along those lines as a
presentation at some point, but I've not done it yet. Tuit shortage
can be a terrible thing.
There's stuff above here

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