Re: reducing patch complexity and conflicts

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2010 at 8:54 AM, David Manura <dm.lua@math2.org> wrote:
> inferences where comments and naming are sparse.  A code browser
> obviously helps here.  This has been mentioned in the past [1-2].

I'm thinking of your use of annotations in SciTE to indicate parse
errors and style warnings iinline. (For those not familiar with this
Scintilla feature, it allows a scripter to add content to the
presentation of code, without any code changes[1] And in SciTE, that
can all be done in Lua.)

So what is required is an annotation editor, which allows a user to
annotate code; these annotations can then be persisted in some
fashion. (The code itself can be presented as read-only.) Can provide
comments, links to external documents and intra-code references,
although this might require a bit of SciTE/Scintilla hacking.

More conventionally, ctags is our friend.

I can't comment about the code base of other languages, but the fact
that there are so many working patches against stock Lua shows that it
can be done.  Your point about re-organizing code in _anticipation_ of
the need to patch is a good one.  Making different patches work nicely
together is probably one of the Hard Problems in software engineering.

steve d.

[1] http://www.scintilla.org/ScintillaDoc.html#Annotations