I use source control locally when I make any large updates to code. It's especially handy to allow reviewers to separate white space and style consistency updates from actual changes. If this sounds familiar, that's because I talked about it in a previous post.

Alas Poor Rita

We really haven't done a lot of new work in the mudlib space the past week with me focusing on some backend server work and Kereth and Rita working on their other projects. Rita did, however, take up the mantle of reviewing my curse and sensitize debuff changes.

We do code review over voice chat because it's easier to make changes live and because we just enjoy hanging out. Rita diligently reviewed all the code style and white space changes first. All 6,300 lines of them. She cracked a joke that for all that change, the actual change is probably less than ten lines. I let her know that no, it was actually just one single line in those files.

Why Bother Reviewing Style and White Space Changes

You might ask why we bother to review style and white space changes. They don't change any real functionality and, in the case of the style updates, I can effect many of them automatically using vim. The real problem comes in when you have to manually adjust some lines that can't be captured in a neat regular expression.

The reason why most shops won't accept whitespace code changes on a grand scale is the danger inherent to any manual work. Rita found a couple dozen things that I had missed. I had also bricked our development server during testing because I accidentally added a space somewhere I shouldn't and blew up the ability to use any command. It's great logging in and the first thing you see is What? followed again by What? every time you try to use a command to figure out what's wrong.

Curses and Sensitizes

We should be able to get the new updates for remove curse and the sensitize line of spells online very soon. Rita has penciled me in for a couple nights this week and I'm fairly confident that the code is ready for prime time. I'm not sure what mudlib we'll tackle next so, until next time, happy hunting folks.