Re: [Tuxmath-devel] Midterm Update: libt4k_common

[Tim H. <ho...@wu...>]

Hi Brendan,

On the topic of t4k_common, I was noticing the other day that Holger has long 
had a wish-list item (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-
bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=490115): implement support for changing locale via a "--
lang" flag. TuxPaint has some nice code to do this. I thought about stealing it 
and wiring it into TuxMath (thanks, Bill!), but then I realized that 
t4k_common was probably the right place to put it, so that TuxType would also 
benefit.

Any interest in adding this challenge to your own TODO pile? At least it would 
give you some new functionality to implement and test...

Best,
--Tim

On Monday, July 12, 2010 02:58:46 pm Brendan Luchen wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> Tthings have been rather uneventful since my last update. A week in Boston
> for the 4th of July didn't leave as much time for coding as I'd hoped, but
> I managed to replace most of the relevant function calls in TuxType with
> calls to T4K_Functions. I'm now doing the same for TuxMath. There are also
> now Doxygen comments in t4k_common.h . Many of these comments are just
> stubs, though. By the end of the week, I want to turn my attention to the
> Mac, then do another round of testing across the three platforms.
> 
> As for the big picture, things are certainly moving along, albeit slowly.
> Since the start of coding, I've shaken the dust off of the library, renamed
> it and the functions therein, gotten it to build and install as a shared
> library and gotten TuxMath and TuxType to use it--all more or less
> automatically--on several Linux- and Windows-based computers. Remaining
> items include: removing the older built-in versions of functions and
> structures, which are effectively dead code in TM and TT; fleshing out the
> documentation (I guess this should be posted as HTML somewhere); and
> extensive testing in preparation for the two merges back into master.
> 
> I haven't hit any enormous brick walls, so far, but there have been plenty
> of small ones to impede progress. More than that, because this project is
> less about producing code and more about moving things around and gluing
> things together across several repositories (and, in this case, several
> machines), things tend to get messy quickly, and I find myself often taking
> a step back to make sure, e.g. I'm in the right directory, which slows
> things down considerably. I underestimated the importance of visible
> progress to motivation--my measure of success has been seeing the game
> launch and behave as it should during gameplay, which, well, isn't all that
> exciting, and leads to distractions. It's one thing to do a less-glorified
> job, but it's quite another to find *myself* losing focus when the program
> does the same thing for the twentieth time.
> 
> So, I'm personally disappointed with how long this is taking, but I'm
> clinging to schedule. There's a light at the end of the tunnel, and I'm
> looking forward to a great benefit to TuxMath, -Type (and -History?) when
> this is through.
> 
> Best,
> Brendan