General development notes (was: [Saga-devel] saga SVN commit 3373: /trunk/adaptors/aws/aws_job/)

[Hartmut Kaiser]

Andre,

> User: amerzky
> Date: 2009/01/24 09:05 AM
> 
> Modified:
>  /trunk/adaptors/aws/aws_job/
>   aws_job_service.cpp, aws_job_service.hpp
> 
> Log:
>  Not to self: do not use boost::process on unix!
>  It is broken!  I should have remembered why I reimplemented the
>  local job adaptor in the first place....
>  Anyway, we use the local job adaptor now, and voila, it works
>  :-)

What's broken? Wouldn't it be better to _fix_ things rather than even to
consider _rewriting_ them?

And please don't tell me again you're not able to debug Boost.Process. This
might have been true as long as you were working on Linux. But now, on the
Mac, you have XCode which has a decent debugger integration (ok, it's just
gdb, but it's working quite well).

Rewriting usually just adds to the mess, by introducing new bugs, a
maintenance headache, code bloat, etc. 
Nothing good to say about rewrites, as long as those don't fully _replace_
the existing code base, increasing the _full_ feature set of the old
implementation (functionality, portability, maintainability, you name it).

OTOH, the more code you rewrite, the less code responsibility is left for
me, so I should be happy... :-/

And a last note: Boost.Process works well for Joao in his Condor adaptor. Go
figure.

Please don't get me wrong. I understand you have deadlines. Usually
deadlines result in times of quick and dirty hacks, which is fine. What we
should avoid, though, is to leave those quick hacks in place forever.
Unfortunately the experience shows those quick hacks either have been fixed
my me or they are still there. But I'm not willing to clean up other
people's mess anymore, I have had my share of this, no thanks.

Regards Hartmut