15 Nov
2005
15 Nov
'05
8:16 p.m.
~1700 lines to add a check? In the future, please do reformatting in its own patch without
semantic changes. This patch would
require an hour or more to review if anyone dared to do it and even if someone did, that
person would have be superhuman to be able
to keep track of that many lines of information.
The risk of introducing a bug is higher with some types of operations than others.
Formatting is a relatively safe operation while
semantic changes to complex code is a highly risky operation. This means that reviewing a
formatting patch is not as important as
reviewing a patch with semantic changes to complex code (and thus it doesn't hurt so
much if a formatting change is large). When
mixing safe and unsafe operations, the overall risk of a introducing a bug in a given
patch is the same as if the changes were
spread over several patches. However, the risk of the individual patch is equal to risk of
the most risky operation in the patch. So
if a 1 line highly risky change is hidden in a 1700 line otherwise safe patch, then the
overall risk for the whole patch is highly
risky.
It may not seem important to have only a few bugs in releases now. We can always use the
excuse that ReactOS is alpha software.
However, if we ever want to have an 1.x release which is more than a toy-OS, then we have
to learn to build better software. And I
would prefer that we learn it before 1 day before the deadline for 1.0.0 since that might
give us some years to get really good at
it. I've written several school papers the night before the deadline, and they were
never any good ;-( Another side effect of
starting early is that some might even be able to use ReactOS before 1.0.0.
Casper