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List:       kde-pim
Subject:    [Kde-pim] KPilot Developer's notes for December 27th
From:       Adriaan de Groot <adridg () cs ! kun ! nl>
Date:       2001-12-27 14:01:04
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[Two sets of notes follow, plus a repeat of the odd-jobs CFA]

KPilot Developer's notes for december 27th 2001
===============================================

So I never posted the previous notes. And besides Maarten's little comment
on the odd jobs, no response either --- but then again, it was Xmas and
maybe people had more important things to do. I know I had enough dinners
that I can fast & hack for the rest of the week.

Things fixed now:

* conduits/vcalconduit/
  - All the configuration dialogs now look ok, after a little fiddling
  about with the .ui files, and the configuration is saved as well.
  A sync is out of the question right now.

Yet another odd job: someone (David?) needs to check all the ToolTips
in the .ui files for the conduits with Qt *2*'s designer. And we need
to check that all the configurations are in fact saved properly. Testers?

KPilot Developer's notes for december 23rd 2001
===============================================

HoHoHo. Let's look back in the ChangeLog to see where we were one year ago.
Struggling with the vcal conduit (it's *still* wonky); missing the 2.1
release deadine (was it that long ago?); cleaning up code.

In these complex modern final days, (to quote Pogo), what's up?

2001-12-18  Adriaan de Groot
* conduits/expense/*
* conduits/null/*
  - These two conduits now have a full configure dialog that's sized
  correctly (afaict without messing around with font settings), that
  saves the settings, and have a working sync action. Whee!

2001-12-20  Adriaan de Groot
* conduits/abbrowser/*
  - This conduit now has a working config dialog and does a sync, although
  I haven't really looked at the sync code itself to check for bugs.
* conduits/knotes/*
  - Ditto; it configures and syncs, although the sync is rather sparse.
  I discovered that const char * const is a useful type, though. It saves
  an accessor function for KConfig entry keys.

The bad conduits:

* conduits/popmail/*
  - Still no .ui file and not many tooltips, but you *can* configure
  this conduit. No sync though.
* conduits/todoconduit/
  - This one is seriously deprecated and I'll try to remove it soon.
* conduits/vcalconduit/*
  - It's got a .ui file which is used badly and which is missing layouts.
  Not a hint of saving configurations though.

OPEN JOBS:

Are you bored? Is your love life lackluster? Do you want to MAKE MONEY FAST?
Do you want to FIND OUT WHAT MICROSOFT DOESNT WANT YOU to KNOW? ... um ...
back to reality: If you'd like to help out with KPilot but don't really know
where to start, and would like to get a little acquainted with the code,
the coding style, and some of the conventions used in KPilot, read on!
If you have grep and a text editor, read on!

The code, and particularly the debugging code, has gone though a number
of phases. For a while, there was that --debug 1023 stuff. I've decided
that that's actually kinda cumbersome for a GUI program, and debugging
has switched back to an all-or-nothing kinda thing. So some things need
to be changed all over the source code, and that's just the kind of
exploratory job for someone with grep and vi. In particular:

* kdDebug() everywhere needs to change into DEBUGCONDUIT, DEBUGKPILOT,
  or one of the other DEBUG* macros defined in kpilot/lib/options.h.
  This will send the debugging output to the sensible debug area.
  Which one you choose depends on where the file lives -- choose wisely.

* DEBUG* calls everywhere need to be surrounded by #ifdef DEBUG #endif.
  This is because some compilers don't optimize away unused strings,
  leading to big bulky (well, sorta) executables. Adding the #ifdefs
  makes sure that there's nothing at all left over from the debugging code
  when debugging is turned off.

* __FUNCTION__ needs to be replaced by k_funcinfo. The popmail conduit is
  bad for that one, at the very least.

* if (debug_level) and its cousin if (debug_level & SOMETHING) need to be
  removed, along with the set of brackets they introduce. The debugging
  statement (usually just a kdDebug() << whatever << endl;) needs to be
  out-dented one tabstop, to line it up properly.

These are, in one sense, rotten little jobs. But they'll take you to all
the corners of the KPilot code, show you some ugly (and some not-so-ugly)
code, and give you a feel for "the lay of the land." After that, fixing
all the remaining off-by-one bugs in the vcal conduit should be a breeze.

-- 
+------------------------------+
| Adriaan de Groot             | Drinken, in een bepaalde tijd symbolisch,
| http://www.cs.kun.nl/~adridg | is in een andere tijd zuipen - Wittgenstein

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