Re: "dselect" replacement team
On 13 Apr 1997, Mark Eichin wrote:
> Much as I am uncomfortable with the attitude, Ian's code *is* very
> clear. Surprisingly so... when I went to look at adding filtering (to
> filter out /usr/local, so we could *finally* comply with the policy
> guide!) the place to put the code actually was clear, the only part
> that wasn't obvious in half an hour of examination (*not* days and
> days) was how to handle the argument parsing without just cheating and
> using globals.
Okay, I have different standards for what I consider 'clear' code.
Everyone does. When I made that comment I was expressing my opinion on the
matter.
Now, in my definition clear code requires a very high comment density,
alot of descriptive text and so on, the actual code must be elagant, which
is a totally subjective judgement - I am getting the feeling that dpkg is
pretty elgantly designed, there are many thing in there that I would have
done myself.
You feel Ian's code is easy to figure out, this is good, but it also
likely indicates you two have similar ideas on what should be where and
why, this is fine. But that is in no means universal.
Also note that this doesn't imply that I cannot read his source, I can,
it's not that hard. I simply think he should have placed more comments in
it, alot more. IMHO this would have made it easier for the rest of us to
make changes.
If you look around you can see the occasional bit of code were the comment
style doesn't seem to match the other bits, I would imagine this was done
by someone modifiying the code at a later date, ditto for the occasional
procedure with lots of comments.
Jason
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