On Sun, Jul 11, 2004 at 11:55:56AM +0200, stéphane ducasse wrote:
> 
> the last two/three days I have been browsing a lot of code while mainly 
> playing with BookMorph.
> And I noticed a lot of "nearly working" or "half broken" behavior. Most 
> of the time you start with a good state of mind and think that you will 
> be able to do something and suddenly you lost a day and get frustrated.
 ...

> So I would like to know how we could proceed to rescue some of the 
> squeak asset.

Personally, I don't mind having some incomplete or unfinished things in
Squeak. Many of them show good ideas and things that could be brought to
completion in the future.

But as you described, there is a real problem when you waste a whole day
trying to get something to work, only to find out that it never really worked
in the first place, but nobody ever bothered to mention it in a class comment.
This is particularly annoying when you realize that the original author could
have added the documentation in about five minutes, but never got around to
doing it.

So what is TSTTCPW? Contribute class comments. Where possible, document
the intent of the class, mention that it, ehem, does not actually work,
and maybe add a couple of example methods or test cases to show how it
is supposed to work.

This is actually very difficult to do, because it requires guessing the
intentions of the original authors, and there is a risk of adding incorrect
or misleading documentation. However, it would address the problem you
described, and it certainly would be easier than trying to actually fix
all of the things in Squeak that never actually worked in the first place ;-)

Dave