kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Brian F. G. Bidulock" <bidulock@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dick,

On Tue, 22 Nov 2011, Dick Hollenbeck wrote:

> One of the best ways to get started actually contributing to KiCad is to offer byte sized
> patches which concentrate on one or two public member fields, and provides accessors for
> these, making the fields protected or private.  I cannot tell you how many of these kinds
> of patches that Wayne and I have made.  I did scores of them in 2008.  Wayne has done more
> than that in the last two years.
> 
> This procedure, if continued by enough man-hours, would transition KiCad more in the
> direction of an object oriented design.  We remember that KiCad was originally C code not
> C++.  So it has been in evolution for the last several years, all the while churning out
> boards that we all benefit from.
> 
> Current "management" is incapable of doing this because current management is not paid
> enough to work on this project full time.  To help with this evolution, the door is open
> to more volunteers.  The product of the work should be reasonably sized patches,
> addressing one or two fields at a time.  Even doing this, these are sometimes thousand
> line patches.
> 
> No disagreement on the need.  Just in attitude, and willingness to contribute in a way
> that is appropriate.
> 

Why one or two fields?  This makes for unnecessary work.

Why not them all?  You see, the easiest way to do this is t
just make all the fields private and then use the compiler
to identify everywhere that contract is broken, change each
occurrence to use an accessor, and they you're done.  There
should be absolutely no change in behaviour unless there is
a compiler bug.  At least that's what I did over a year ago.

Next step would be to refactor the accessors: e.g. factoring
setX(), setY() to move(), etc.

Having already done it once, I don't feel much like doing it
again myself.

--brian

-- 
Brian F. G. Bidulock    � The reasonable man adapts himself to the �
bidulock@xxxxxxxxxxx    � world; the unreasonable one persists in  �
http://www.openss7.org/ � trying  to adapt the  world  to himself. �
                        � Therefore  all  progress  depends on the �
                        � unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw �