Audit the buttons code

Dimitrie O. Paun dpaun at rogers.com
Tue Oct 5 08:28:32 CDT 2004


On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 08:18:50AM +0200, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Such comments do suffer from another problem. They tend to fall out of 
> date. For that reason alone I'm not sure this comment is a good idea. 
> Otherwise, we get a future commit that changes something, but neglects 
> to update the comment accordingly, and the comment turns useless or even 
> dangerous. Maybe if we change that to contain the date or the CVS 
> version number of the file that was audited....

This is not a problem for these comments because:
  -- each control is implemented in one, and only one file
  -- each control has it's own independent audit
  -- the comment is at the top of the file, where it's most visible
  -- from the previous 3 points, it's very difficult to work on
     any control without stumbling upon it.
  -- it includes the exact version of the documentation, so when new
     documentation is released, we can compute the delta
  -- it includes the exact date when the audit took place, so we
     can compute deltas on the control side
  -- they are not open ended. That is, they list all the missing features,
     and such, if people forget to update them, 99% of the time this simply
     means they forgot to *delete* something. This is much less of a problem
     then not adding. It can easily get fixed when someone does a new audit,
     or wants to reimplement that feature.
  -- we had them for more then 2 years now, and there wasn't a single instance
     when people forgot to update them. Which means that the theory detailed
     this far actually works in practice.
  -- I've been closely watching patches againt controls myself (along with a
     few other people, it seems), so we have a pretty good safety net.

-- 
Dimi.



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