[Libreoffice] Script to find undocumented classes

Michael Meeks michael.meeks at novell.com
Wed Dec 1 12:12:01 PST 2010


On Wed, 2010-12-01 at 14:25 -0500, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> But I've already become immune to this hard-to-figure-out code base, so
> I stopped thinking that way years ago.  I've even trained myself to
> ignore those German comments.  When I see functions, I see chunks of
> code, not functions. ;-)

	The ability to quickly read, and work effectively on a vast, gnarly,
un-documented code-base is an incredibly valuable one - it turns out
most commercial code-bases are a total mess internally; LibreOffice is
nothing special. Furthermore, the code is -always- correct, and comments
bit-rot at an amazing rate.

	However; I'm fairly convinced that there is a happy medium somewhere
closer to Lubos than Thorsten but in-between - I don't think that
investing tons of time into blindly documenting the behaviour of every
method is at all necessary; yet clearly having good, descriptive
per-method (and often more usefully per-class) documentation is really
important. IMHO we cannot and should not put a break on writing that
just to improve merge-ability, so I applaud another of Miklos' great
hacks :-)

	Finally - wrt. ultimate code quality - I tend to think that growing our
test suite can also enable the re-factoring that can make our APIs both
pretty and intuitive over time, by providing good, clean, and wide
ranging tests that will catch inadvertent changes in side-effects
as/when they are introduced.

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot



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