Week 1: The Ten Questions: All or Nothing!

Hi everyone,

This week, I continued my quest to learn more about Olga’s work, but struggled a little. Therefore I approached my mentors. Christian helped me to understand Olga’s work in a better way. He put forward some questions for better understanding. Those questions were helpful. Regardless of the project, those questions will help anyone who wants to understand someone’s work. So, it’s a good idea to share those in this blog.[Hope he does not mind]

[Dont Hold your breath] Here are those:

What was the goal of each patch?
Which approach did she took to achieve the goal?
What were the goals of the patch series?
Which approach did she took to achieve the goals?
What was the goal of her previous patch series?
What was the general direction her patch series were going?
Why did she took that direction?
Are there ways to continue in the same direction?
Are there ways to achieve similar goals?
How were her goals similar and different from the goals in my proposal?
Is it possible to use the same approach?

*(These questions might help someone in future)
*Note- Although title says 10, but they are 11 in total

After story:

Even after going through Olga’s patches, I wasn’t able to come up with the proper approach to unify ref-filter and pretty formatting logic. I dont think i can proceed forward Olga’s way.

pretty and ref-filter uses totally different structures.
Teach ref-filter.c to support everything that pretty.c can do, As they just increase the code that is useless to ref-filter.

Right now, the only possible way I can think of is keep using both structures and make transition table between them. I’m not sure about this.(In fact, any suggestion will be highly appreciated.)

Whats next?

“A good approach often comes from studying things, from trials and errors, and from discussions with other people” - Christian

So, now I’m going to deep-dive into pretty.c and ref-filter.c formats. Also, will add support for atoms in pretty.c. This will improve my understanding of pretty.c

Summary: This week no patches, but it’s full of learning.

Thanks, Christian and Heba for helping me to get started.

Note - I dont want my weekly blogs to sound like personal notes. So, I’m thinking about writing another blog series about my findings related to GSoC project. Those will be more on technical side.

bye… cya!