[JDEV] Jabber/C contributing issues, was: MIU

[Andrew Sayers]

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On Thu, Sep 04, 2003 at 08:50:23 +0200, maqi at jabberstudio.org wrote:
> 
> To Andrew (didn't get his posting, only saw a reply)

Yes, I had that with one of my own posts last night.  Since this stuff
is definitely getting through, maybe this is somehow related to the js.o
hack?

Aside: thanks to PGP, you can be sure that, despite the hack, my
messages haven't been tampered with :)

>                                                     : Doxygen even
> provides helpful documentation even when there are *no comments at all*.
> It then generates nice highlighted HTML with hyperlinks. For understanding
> and perhaps contributing, this is better than nothing. Perhaps someone
> contributes proper code documentation :-).

What you're talking about is exploring other people's code, not 
documenting your own.  If you learn code best with a web browser, by all
means run Doxygen on any program you intend to play with - but don't ask
me to do it for you.

> Of course, everybody is free to code as he likes. But for my part I do not
> see the benefit from the current scheme. Taking the transports as an
> example again: We have several re-implementations (MSN, Yahoo, ICQ). Every
> one of these transports has been or is going to be rewritten since "the
> old one is crap".

I can only speak for the MSN transport here, but yes - the old transport
was badly written, crashed all the time, used an old version of the
protocol, made bad design decisions, lacked documentation, and so on.
If it had proper documentation, I'd have taken slightly less time to
realise it was badly written.

I looked at several Messenger codebases when I started the transport.
Some were well-written, some were well-documented, but none had
everything I needed, so I started from scratch.  I definitely didn't
just re-invent the wheel for its own sake.

>                   The "new" transports *again* lack precautions concerning
> sustainability. I bet all those transports will be ditched again as soon
> as the old developer ceases to support "his" transport: So let's re-invent
> the wheel.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  Jabberstudio.org is down right now, so
you'll just have to take my word for it that there's (some)
documentation in msn-tng.  I admit that it's woefully incomplete, for
various good reasons I can go into if you care.

I realise the message where I sent this didn't reach you, but I strongly
agree that good documentation is important to the proper functioning of
a project - I just don't think people should write documentation in the
way that best suits their style of work.

	- Andrew
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