FAQ -- why were these lines changed in the source code?

From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 30 2002 - 11:42:58 EDT

  • Next message: Paul Rohr: "DELETEP, FREEP, and friends"

    [ If you already know about advanced Bonsai tools like cvsblame, then skip
      this message. ]

    Ever found yourself reading a section of code and scratching your head about
    it? Yesterday, Pat did.

    At 01:58 AM 5/30/02 -0400, Patrick Lam wrote:
    >I found this mysteriously commented code in fl_SectionLayout:
    >
    >@@ -1579,11 +1605,11 @@
    > m_pLayout->removeSection(this);
    > pPrevSL->format();
    >
    >-// FV_View* pView = m_pLayout->getView();
    >-// if (pView)
    >-// {
    >-// pView->_setPoint(pcrx->getPosition());
    >-// }
    >+ FV_View* pView = m_pLayout->getView();
    >+ if (pView)
    >+ {
    >+ pView->_setPoint(pcrx->getPosition());
    >+ }
    >
    >The key to fixing this bug was enabling this code; anyone have any
    >idea why it was commented?

    Elsewhere on this thread, Sam answered this specific question, but I wanted
    to make sure that in the future everyone knows how to answer it for
    themselves.

    Pat's change was to version 1.146 of that file. So, take a look at the
    previous version of that file (1.145) as follows:

    http://www.abisource.com/bonsai/cvsblame.cgi?file=abi/src/text/fmt/xp/fl_Sec
    tionLayout.cpp&rev=1.145&root=/cvsroot

    Scrolling down to that section of the code, you'll find that those lines
    were last changed in the following two revisions of the code:

      1.80 msevior Feb 12 2001

             More fixes for headers/footers. Also improve Insertion Point
             Locking code. Old way was stupid.

      1.78 msevior Feb 12 2001

             Improvements to changing page sizes with page Numbers. Doing
             this with multiple pages still causes segfaults :-(

    If you want to go back further, look at version 1.77 as follows:

    http://www.abisource.com/bonsai/cvsblame.cgi?file=abi/src/text/fmt/xp/fl_Sec
    tionLayout.cpp&rev=1.77&root=/cvsroot

    There you'll discover that the relevant code was originally added in the
    following grand mal commit:

        1.32 eric Feb 22 1999

             Here's another checkin:

             1. Reworked all the code which positions lines within columns.
             Added
             the notion of a ColumnBreaker, with an algorithm which is nearly
             identical to our LineBreaker. The result is that the overall
             layout algorithm is now much more linear and clean. I did not get
             the performance boost I expect to get from this on import of large
             plain text files. That looks like a separate problem. In fact, I
             have probably hurt the performance of the app on large documents
             of any kind, but I'm confident that I can get that performance
             back with some adjustments to the code. For now, the code is much
             cleaner than it was.

             2. Due to change item #1 above, the widow-orphan code was
             completely rewritten. Watch out.

             3. Added support for another paragraph property, "keep-together",
             which basically says that a parargraph may not break across a
             column.

             4. Added another paragraph property, "keep-with-next", which means
             that the ColumnBreaker should not put a column break between that
             block and the next one. I have not yet implemented this feature
             in the ColumnBreaker.

             5. Added support for forced column breaks.

             6. Added special-case code for blocks which end on a forced
             break. This fixes bug 192.

             7. Changed data strux for sectionLayouts. They're now kept on a
             doubly-linked list just like BlockLayouts are.

             8. I *tried* adding code to coalesce runs on the fly. This ended up
             being rather problematic, so I #if0'd the code, which I'll revisit
             laer.

             9. Removed the concept of an ImageFactory. The job of creating a
             GR_Image is now in the GR_Graphics class. With the previous
             design, we had no way of creating a PostScript image.

             10. Added concept of a display size to the GR_Image class. This
             required touching a bunch of Windows code, which I have not yet
             even checked to see if it will compile.

             11. Added code to stretchBlit images under GDK. Borrowed the
             code from imlib.

             12. Started working on insert/delete of section breaks. Not working
             yet.

             13. inlined several methods in fp_Column

             14. Modified the fp_Run API to account for the fact that some kinds
             of runs cannot contain the insertion point.

             15. Added some XML comments to the top of ABW files.

             16. Added an exporter for HTML. It doesn't do anything with
             images yet, but it handles the basic char and paragraph formatting
             stuff.

             17. Deleted some unused properties from pp_Property.cpp

             18. Fixed the line leading in PostScript code (bug 233)

             19. Fixed a few compiler warnings.
      
    Finally, if you want to see *all* changes to the relevant function since
    Eric originally added it, you'll need to extract the two versions of the
    function and diff them manually. In this case, the file has evolved so much
    that cvsdiff just plain chokes on it:

    http://www.abisource.com/bonsai/cvsview2.cgi?command=DIFF&subdir=abi%2Fsrc%2
    Ftext%2Ffmt%2Fxp&file=fl_SectionLayout.cpp&rev1=1.32&rev2=1.145&whitespace_m
    ode=show&diff_mode=context

    Voila! All kinds of lovely information for you code genealogists. (And if
    that's not enough, you know which developers to ask.)

    Paul
    motto -- Bonsai and CVS are *wonderful* tools



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Thu May 30 2002 - 11:46:38 EDT