Re: Hi from a new member of the xboard team

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 <[email protected]>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
>
>