Re: [9fans] Changelogs & Patches?

[tlaronde@polynum.com]

On Fri, Dec 26, 2008 at 11:25:33AM -0600, blstuart@bellsouth.net wrote:
>
> Back when I used CWEB on a regular basis (I don't find myself
> writing as much substantive code from scratch of late), I
> experienced an interesting phenomenon.  I could write
> pretty good code, almost as a stream of consciousness.
> The tool made it natural to present the code in the order
> in which I could understand it, rather than the order the
> compiler wanted it.

Yes, but this means you have adapted the way you are writing the code
to the logics behind litterate programming. Starting with a "structured
programming" approach (litterate is indeed more) is probably the best.
If, as I have done..., one looks to the finger instead of the moon, and
takes it to be a way for formatting comments, with all the bells and
whistles of TeX, one is definitively not on the right track---and that's
why the packages to format C comments embedded in source is definitely
not the same.

Once you get at it, it really helps as you describe. (I have one library
that I wrote almost in one go---the Esri's SHAPE lib support for
KerGIS--- and that does the job; but it was not the first, but it was
the first I wrote with explanations in _french_, my native and thinking
language; so now, since I think in french, I write in french---but code,
including identifiers and one line comments are in \CEE. This is the
second lesson I learned).

>
> However, in terms of changelogs and such, I'd say
> that's still an open question.  It would seem that there
> should be some way to automate the creation of a
> changelog (at least in the form of a list of pointers)
> from the literate source.  But the literate style itself
> doesn't really seem to create anything new in terms
> of the high level overview that you'd see in release
> notes or changelogs.

I like text, because of diffs. And CWEB has diffs ;) You can even confer
this with Brooks' "The mythical man-month", and adapting slightly CWEB
diffs features will gave the highlighting changes doc Brooks has written
about.

Even with data, to get to the point one needs only diffs (I use it with
vectorial map stuff to highlight what changes have been made between
different versions provided by surveyors. This with the ability to show
the state of data at YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss is invaluable.)

That is one of the many reasons I found plan9 so interesting: text
oriented.
--
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
                 http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C