[FreeNX-kNX] Tasks - Has someone too much time? ;-)

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Friday 18 March 2005 02:23, Fabian Franz wrote:
> Tasks for nxc our new nxclient structure:
>
> http://developer.berlios.de/pm/task.php?group_project_id=838&group_id=2978&
>func=browse

i've been looking at these over the last couple evenings ... i'm a bit 
concerned in a few areas and have a lot of questions...

basically, i'm wrapping a new GUI around this and looking to help make nxc 
feature complete. the challenges i have:

	o no documentation. this makes getting involved with this 10x harder than it 
should be. can we please adopt a go-forward policy of documenting at least 
all public and protected members in classes? doxygen style comments would 
rock. also, documentation for config files, etc.. is needed. this can be 
gleaned by visiting N pages on the 'net, but that's N-1 too many ;) ... and 
really, an overall "this is the general architecture of nxc" paper would also 
be very, very good.

	o no tests. this is of a slightly lower priority than documentation ;) but 
for this sort of software, having unit tests is going to be critical, 
especially as this needs to be able to keep up with NoMachine changes _and_ 
remain compatible / non-broken with FreeNX and itself. do the current authors 
have any preference when it comes to testing frameworks?

	o revision control. i had a bit of a hard time finding where the sources for 
nxc was, as most of the FreeNX stuff is now in subversion but the nxc stuff 
is in CVS? will nxc be moving to svn sometime? or will it be staying in CVS?

	o code quality. i wonder why we are using unsigned ints and "#define TRUE 1" 
when we have booleans in C++ ... or why all ^M's the end of lines? or the 
references to MOZ_NX (e.g. in NXRunVersion.h) is there some history here that 
i should be aware of? or some odd compatibility issues? because some of my 
first desires is to do some janitorial work so i can read the code more 
efficiently. this is to aid my understand of what's going on since i don't 
have the luxury of documentation. but i don't want to spend time doing 
something that's not useful.

	o bug report quality. there are reports that mention crashes but don't 
include backtraces. there are vague references to classes, which sends me off 
grepping around. these reports are filed by the authors, so i'd expect things 
like backtraces, file names, etc... these all make it vastly easier for 
someone to get into the project productively. 

	o where do i send patches for nxclient to?

	o what syncing will need to be done with NoMachine's efforts, if any?

	o does anyone on this project hang out on IRC ever, and if so where?

i'm sure i'll have more questions in the days to come as i continue to ramp up 
and hack on this.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43
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