At WikiSym, I implemented some Oddmuse stuff while I was disconnected from the net. The patch grew, and tests were failing, so even when I got connected again, I could not commit my half-assed patch. I kept working on it. It had some important stuff in it, and it had some weird stuff in it (renaming of parameters from “rchostonly” to “host” and renaming of variables to go along with it). It grew. Tests kept failing. I was angry.
Today I copied the current state of the files to my desktop, and started to use EdiffMode, in order to rescue the important stuff from the working copy and trash the rest. I feel so much better!
Trashing patches that keep growing is important. Extreme Programming mandates that your stuff runs at the end of the day and passes all the tests. If it doesn’t, trash it, and start again tomorrow. If you can’t get an incremental change that works today, how do you hope to finish anything at all?
But it hurts. 😢
Oh well. Trying to rescue more and more, I see the tests failing again. Damn!
#Software #Oddmuse