From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 09 2002 - 19:28:24 EDT
At 09:17 PM 5/9/02 +0100, Tomas Frydrych wrote:
>The other thing is, that with the rewrite Martin has started I suspect
>we will not have a properly working code in the HEAD for some
>time -- my understanding was that this was precisely the reason for
>the 1.0 release, so that we could do radical things to the head.
Gosh, that's not the sense I've gotten.
Moving HEAD on to a new unstable tree allows people to start doing much more
radical surgery, but I hope nobody *intends* to just plain break the tree.
To my knowledge, there are at least three folks doing simultaneous surgery
on HEAD:
- Martin refactoring the layout engine
- Dom upgrading to GTK 2
- you swapping in Pango
So far, you've each been doing a great job of introducing your own changes
in ways which hit CVS without affecting each other's ability to keep
working. This is a very Good Thing.
In particular, my understanding is that Martin is taking pains to ensure
that at each step of his refactoring, he gets back to a known good state as
quickly as possible.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Apr/0734.html
I shudder to think what would happen if you each felt free to break the tree
for your own changes. Ouch. Having all three of you dead in the water or
refusing to refresh your view against an unstable main repository sounds
like a recipe for disaster -- or at least for some hellish merges
downstream.
I'm a realist, of course. There *will* be broken functionality and
regressions here and there -- few refactorings are perfect up front -- but
by staying disciplined, those can be rapidly fixed while the new code is
fresh in the author's mind.
>As far as the Pango work is concerned, this does not make it any
>harder or easier, it just makes the sources clearer, particularly as
>there is now going to be a new set of #ifdef WITH_PANGO
>sections. In terms of progress, I have hardly started and doubt
>there will be anything to show for it in the next month or two.
Agreed. Getting the BIDI blocks out of the way will help make the PANGO
demarcation a lot clearer.
As I said in the prior message, after reviewing the code I'm totally sold
now. Indeed, AFAICT, you're barely removing any non-BIDI code at all --
mostly just all that ugly ifdef BIDI machinery.
Paul
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