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 > >
