Re: Directory restructuring

[John Darrington]

On Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 10:54:22PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
     
     > If you would like, this week-end I can start looking at re-organising
     > the subdirectories like we discussed.
     >
     > Or do you want to do this yourself?
     
     I'd like to publicly discuss what the new structure should be.
     
     Once we've made some kind of decision, I don't care too much who
     implements it.

I'm generally happy with the structure you proposed.  Having said
this, when I've done these sort of exercises in the past, at the end
of it, I have a much better idea of what is appropriate than at the
start.   It's difficult to get a good picture of the design while
everything is mixed up in one place (which is the whole point of
seperating it in the first place).


The procedure usually ends up as:

1.  Remove all -I directives from the Makefiles.

2.  Classify the source files according to some reasonable criteria, and put
    them into respective sub-directories.   

3.  Put in the whatever -I directives are necessary in order to make
    the damn thing build.

4.  Run a script over the Makefiles, to extract the -I directives and
    create a diagram of dependencies between directories.  Identify
    any dependencies which don't seem to make sense.

5.  Rework modules which cause illogical dependencies.  Split up any
    files which seem to belong in more than one class. 

6.  Goto 1.


Invariably the result is not perfect.  But it at least identifies
areas which need attention.

J'



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