Will Manley <pol...@williammanley.net> wrote: > On Sat, Oct 27, 2012, at 16:51, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: > > Boutier and Kerneis have made available a draft of their latest paper: > > > > Matthieu Boutier, Gabriel Kerneis. Generating events with style. > > Submitted for publication. October 2012. > > > > > > http://hal-univ-diderot.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/74/29/02/PDF/kerneis-boutier-2013.pdf > > > > Pages 5, 6 and 9 constitute a good analysis of why Polipo is > > unmaintainable. (Note that this is a draft, and hasn't been peer > > reviewed yet.) > > With respect I don't think that suggests that Polipo is unmaintainable.
I agree. > In my opinion the biggest barrier to easy maintainership and the reason > that you have found it difficult to find a replacement for yourself as > chief Polipo maintainer comes down to two aspects: > * The lack of automated tests. Making changes to a mature code-base > requires confidence that you are not breaking anything or otherwise > causing regressions to any of the requirements on that codebase. This > means there needs to be some knowledge of both the diverse way the code > is used, how it's expected to behave and how a particular change can > affect these use-cases. In Polipo's case this information is encoded > in your head and it would be a great effort on another's part to reach > that same level of understanding. With good automated tests this > information is encoded in the tests so someone can be an effective > maintainer even if their understanding of both the software and the > problem domain is incomplete. > * The fact that the current master branch is not release worthy and only > you know why and how means that there is a lot of work for a new > maintainer to do before the fruits of their labour pay off. Another, in my opinion more important, aspect is that there simply aren't too many people interested in spending a significant amount of time working on HTTP implementations for free. For example Privoxy is not event-driven and has automated tests (of course one never has enough tests) and yet the project isn't exactly overrun by volunteers either. Fabian
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Windows 8 Center - In partnership with Sourceforge Your idea - your app - 30 days. Get started! http://windows8center.sourceforge.net/ what-html-developers-need-to-know-about-coding-windows-8-metro-style-apps/
_______________________________________________ Polipo-users mailing list Polipo-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/polipo-users
