[Rails-devel] 1844 implementation and some general thoughts on Rails coding

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

Martin:

now that I have hopefully all changes for 2.0 done, I will focus on 
1844/1854.

One thing I would like to avoid this time is the code duplication in 
sub-classes of major Rails classes (like OperatingRound, StockRound, 
PublicCompany etc.). This is a nightmare to support and debug.

What really makes this difficult is to find the differences to the 
standard implementation and checking if the difference is by chance 
(e.g. bug fixes not implemented there) or required due to a rule change.

Take for example StockRound:

In addition to the general class, there are 7 game specific sub-classes, 
4 more general sub-classes that itself contain another 5 game specific 
sub-classes.

If all of them copy the general code of share selling to change a minor 
detail how shares are sold, there are close to 20 implementations of 
share selling, which have to be maintained.

The general guidelines should be:

* Game specific code should only contain code that is relevant to 
implement a delta specific to that game. It should not copy general code.

* If this is not possible, comments on what was copied and what is the 
intended change is a MUST.

So Martin (and everyone else writing code for Rails) please think hard 
or ask for help BEFORE copying code from methods in general classes.

I know the problem is that many methods, especially in the Round 
classes, have been written in a fashion that reusing them is difficult 
and code copying easy.

However the better solution is: Refactor the general method FIRST to 
allow re-use and than call the re-factored method from the game specific 
class.

To increase co-operation for 1844 and 1854 development, I have added 
wiki pages for those games, that allow to share a list of things to do 
and what is already implemented.

http://github.com/freystef/Rails/wiki/1844
http://github.com/freystef/Rails/wiki/1854

Sorry for sounding harsh, that is not my intention. My intention is to 
make all our life in the future easier.

Stefan