Re: renames under CVS

[Lee Sau Dan]

>>>>> "Greg" == Greg A Woods <address@hidden> writes:

    Greg> I know of at least one very successfull programmer who names
    Greg> all his C source and header files with very plain and
    Greg> meaningless names (letterNUMBER.c).  He doesn't use CVS --
    Greg> in fact I'm not sure he uses any formal version tracking
    Greg> tool.  At least one of his programs is quite large -- over
    Greg> 40 files and over 50,000 lines of source.  He never has to
    Greg> worry about renaming files because he attaches no
    Greg> significance to their names.  (I don't know that he uses any
    Greg> kind of IDE that helps him navigate his programs, but
    Greg> regardless of the file names some kind of identifier search
    Greg> tool becomes invaluable on larger projects anyway, and on
    Greg> really large programs you'll eventually need to do deeper
    Greg> analysis on your source and draw call graphs and such too).

I guess that  he uses 'tags' or 'etags' (or  something simlar) to help
him jump quickly  to any function by giving  the function name.  There
is  then  no need  to  care  about which  file  each  function is  in.
Possibly his IDE is Emacs.


You may treat his source code as a "database" where each C-function is
an entity.  Files  are then just an arbitrary partition  of the set of
all   c-functions  in   this  database   convenient  enough   for  the
compilers/editors/OS to  handle.  The concept  of "file" here  is thus
just an artifact  for the compilers and filesystem  to handle the data
stored  in  this  "database".   Without  using any  global  or  static
variables, C  programs are just  a collection of C-functions.   So, we
can handle it that way.

I've seen  C programs that  are in the  other extreme, maybe  the Xinu
source code:  each function  rests in its  own file.  The  filename is
just the same as the function name.  Is that more manageable?  I don't
know.  I can  only tell that this is easier for  the compiler or build
system.


-- 
Lee Sau Dan                     李守敦(Big5)                    address@hidden(HZ) 

E-mail: address@hidden
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee