Preventing duplication of effort

Now that more and more changes to RO5 are being made by developers there is the risk of duplication of effort as at present there’s no way of letting others now what one is working on.

An example of this is adding keyboard shortcuts to the Filer. Martin Avison is considering doing this whilst Adrian Lees, as shown on the Iyonix mailing list, has already added various shortcuts.

Another example is the Clipboard module which I’ve 32-bitted and was about to send in only to find out that James Lampard beat me to it.

Therefore I think that it would be good to get some mechanisms in place so that people can let others know what they are doing/intend to do so as to prevent work being duplicated. It would also open up the possibility of collaboration between developers interested in the same components as well as promote discussion on direction/implementation of changes.

Any comments?

A good idea. People just need to add a topic to General and tell people what they are doing or intend to do.

I’d like to see a mailing list. Whilst this forum is usable a mailing list would mean that you don’t have to keep polling this forum to read new messages – they’d arrive with the rest of the mail which is much more convenient.

That’s exactly what the “Code review” part of our forum is about. Before you start putting actual effort into some changes, you should probably propose your intentions there for people to add their tuppence worth.

Of course, that only helps if all the people contributing to the shared source project bother to take part in that bit of the forums, too. Feel free to drum up some interest by posting to the newsgroups, etc.

Another example is the Clipboard module which I’ve 32-bitted and was about to send in only to find out that James Lampard beat me to it.

Heh, ;)

Sorry about that. I’m not a clipboard-protocol guru, so I’m leaving it to others to finish off at the moment.

To prevent any further embarrassing mishaps I’ll briefly describe what I’m doing at the moment: Currently I’m messing around with Alarm to make it use the desktop font in it’s icon rather than using the old system font, I’m also squashing some annoying bugs – someone’s messed up the messages file at some point (stripping some spaces from the end of some lines) resulting in silly interactive help messages.

The ‘set alarm’ window has been broken by someone to be fully open all the time; I’ve reinstated the original behaviour of toggling size based on the selection of the ‘Repeating Alarm’ icon. I’ve also added some new behaviour – whenever you toggle the window it’s automatically moved to be fully on screen.

I’m also intending to do some more work on CloseUp. I’ve discovered that you can enter silly values in the Magnifier/Scale window – and they stay there. I’ve changed this to refresh the values whenever the window is opened from the menu. I’ve also discovered that if a serious error occurs resulting in a Wimp generated Describe/Continue/Quit error box, then CloseUp will quit whether you click on Continue or Quit. So I’ll have to review my error generating procedure.

Steve

Thanks for pointing out that the “Code riview” forum can be used for this. However like Colin I’d prefer a mailing list if that’s possible.

James

Sorry about that.

That’s alright, it’s taken me a bit longer than I had wanted to get it ready for submission (having done most of the work the day after it was released).

I’ve just tried ‘your’ version and unfortunately it doesn’t work correctly due to some 26-bit code being left in. I’ve raised the issue on the “Code review” forum.

Colin – regarding your request for a mailing list, I thought I’d point out (in case you hadn’t noticed) that the forum has an RSS feed. This can be used in a similar way to a mailing list, in the sense that you don’t have to regularly visit the website to check up on the latest posts.