Stephen's Work Ramblings

The next phase of the project to clean up the LCFG client (goals 3, 4 and 5) is to run everything through the perltidy tool and then fix the code to satisfy the perlcritic code checker down to level 4. Having all the code consistently indented with an automated tool may seem like a trivial thing to do but it makes such a difference to the maintainability of code. I realise that Python coders have been going on about this for years so it’s nothing new… We chose a coding style for the LCFG server refactoring project and I am using the same for the LCFG client. At the time we added a few notes on the LCFG wiki PerlCodingStyle page. I guess I probably ought to upload my .perltidyrc configuration file to that page so that it can be easily reused.

The use of perlcritic to check code is probably slightly more controversial for some people. It checks your code against a set of rules and recommendations originally laid out in Damian Conway’s book Perl Best Practices. If you don’t like some of those rules you are going to find it very annoying. We’ve found that aiming to satisfy levels 4 and 5 (the most critical issues) results in a vast improvement in code quality. Below that you very rapidly get into a lot of tedious transformations not all of which give you any great benefit. Knowing when to just ignore the moans of the tool is a very useful skill.

The work to cleanup rdxprof is now pretty much finished. All the functionality has been moved out into the LCFG::Client module so that all that happens in the rdxprof code is 3 simple calls to subroutines in the core module:

1. SetOptions – Parse the command line parameters and sets LCFG::Client variables
2. Init – Initialises the environment (mostly just ensuring certain directories exist)
3. Run – This does the actual work (either OneShot or ServerLoop)

There is still a small number of dependencies on global variables that would be nice to remove in the future but nothing critical for now.

This concludes goals 1 and 2 on the project plan. The hope was that this would only take one day of work but it ended up needing 2 days. That is due to my not having initially spotted the real degree of peculiarity of the coding style. The rdxprof code was definitely much more complex in terms of how it approached the “structure” of the entire program than anything I had encountered in the LCFG server code refactoring project. Hopefully now that particular intricate unpicking job is complete the rest will be more straightforward.