[Rails-devel] Code duplication (in 1837 and in general)

[Stefan F. <ste...@we...>]

Martin,
could you please avoid to duplicate code and classes that differentiate 
only a single parameter? Current example are those classes related to 
Folding and Merging into the three national railways of 1837.

*** General remark for all contributors
(so currently mainly Martin and Alexander):

 From my experience now, one thing that makes refactoring and rewriting 
of Rails somehow difficult and tedious is code duplication in the past.

To some degree this is always unavoidable, as this is the easiest way to 
ensure that code can be changed without breaking existing code.

However later on it is difficult to merge the code again as you have to 
check carefully if the code is only copied or if the code was changed 
afterwards.

So please think double, before you copy code from existing classes or if 
there other ways to ensure your goal.

I know it is especially difficult for the Round classes as they are 
combining all kind of functionality. I will break those classes into 
smaller bits as soon as Rails 2.0 is out of its door, however the more 
code in existing Round classes exists, it will get more work to break 
them up.

Feel free to comment.

Stefan