Re: [ANN] Looking for new LuaJIT maintainers
- From: Aleksey Demakov <ademakov@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: luajit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 2 Aug 2015 22:28:18 +0600
On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 10:46 PM, Mike Pall <mikelj-1508@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Vyacheslav Egorov wrote:
I have a somewhat procedural question: are you going to open-source
your private test suite?
Yes, I've planned to set aside some time to prepare it for release
during the transition phase.
A comprehensive test suite is certainly a must. This is the single
most important thing if the development is handed out from the
principal author of a software package to other people. This is even
more important than the documentation.
IMHO, documenting technical details on the internals is not so
important. Documentation is necessary for external API, to let people
use it without studying the source base. But when your goal is to work
exactly on the source base, at least for me, it is often easier to
read the source code directly than study some sort of its description.
However sometimes behind a huge pile of technical details there is a
simple principle, that is not easy to figure out unless you know it
beforehand. If a newcomer starts to work on a task, only a small
portion of the code is studied and the full picture is not seen for a
while. In this case with the best intentions to improve some
particular feature, the whole thing might be broken.
So transferring the knowledge of such basic architectural principles
to new people is yet another very important thing. Unfortunately this
is hard to document, and even if it is documented, people often do not
get the memo. Only training works in this case.
So for rookies it's very important to work for some time along with the experts.
Regards,
Aleksey
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