The "iGoogle bug"

[Bernardo Innocenti]

Jordan Crouse wrote:


> NAK.  What you are suggesting will completely breaking the entire Cimarron
> infrastructure, which is not something I am willing to do at this stage.
> Much time (and by that I mean nearly 4 years) went into writing, verifying
> and validating this code.  We have a bug that needs to be fixed - and that
> doesn't happen by completely removing the internal workings of the engine.

You make it seem like this code was the product of 4 years of refinement.
In reality, the parts I proposed to refactor are one reason why it was so
struggling.

Yes, this particular bug *could* be just fixed by adding yet another special
case in the code.

But don't you see there won't ever be an end to this?  This is already the
fifth or sixth serious amd_drv bug I fix in a short span of time.
The more I look at the code, the more I'm convinced there are several others
coming.

I can't even imagine how hard it would be to write this much code without
even enabling compiler warnings, which I did a couple of months ago, after
spending a day chasing a missing prototype.

What you call "verified and validated code", is actually a very fragile,
complex set of ad-hoc checks and magic numbers.  The slightest environmental
changes break it badly, as happened multiple times when I upgraded the X
server from 1.1 to 1.3:

Debugging this class of problems, namely memory corruption, uninitialized
values, and missing synchronization, is *extremely* hard and time consuming.
I'm suggesting a way out...  In a matter of weeks rather than years.

-- 
   //  Bernardo Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
 \X/ One Laptop Per Child - http://www.laptop.org/