As Bruno posted the contribution guidelines it is time to clean up the mess I made and separate the different features from the master branch and from each other. I’m afraid it won’t be easy given that my public master branch was already littered with these feature fragments.
First I have identify the unrelated commits in the history in order to determine the new feature branches. I was working on several problems and most of them isn’t ready to be merged to the main development line.
- ANTLR parser. This feature involves the AST classes, removing the old ANTLR thing, and adding the new ANTLR grammar. A potential issue could be those constructor codes that was added in the type-inference branch which I integrated in to the master for accessing those modifications.
- The D Element label provider. This feature aimed to bring a more JDT-like icon set in the necessary places, such as the Outline view, the Script View and the completion proposal list. I found that basically this is not much more than one commit. There was also a hack to get the module name in a module definition label, but I’m quite uncertain of that change. However, this is a complication as I submitted that change in a random time, so I can’t use a range of commits to separate it out. Perhaps if it is easy to do, I should just simply get rid of it. This feature would add new icon files and change the DeeModelElementLabelProvider class.
- Static library support. Now this is a worthy feature that is the closest to being completed. However, the issue mentioned above would make it complicated to separate to its own branch. After the separation I should request Bruno to have a look on this feature. The affected code is the builder, the project preferences and spreads to places like DLTKModuleResolver in the core.parser package. The change sets are ranging from here to there.
- Bracket inserting. Should be quite straightforward as it is only one commit.
- Type inference. The code that was submitted on this feature does nothing really interesting at the moment. It contains some key refactorings however that probably should be used later for many reasons. One of them is to have a visitor structure that is sufficient to work with all AST class and the other is replace the getMemberScope() (and later probably other AST member-) methods with visitor based processing code. The actual type inference code is only exploratory, trying to integrate the dltk’s type inference basics as an entry point code.
- Renewing the completion proposal collecting code. The visitor refactoring above could be potentially useful for collecting completion proposal and would be better than the existing code as it is quite obscure. This completion proposal system should be aware of the priority listing, keywords, templates, and all resolvable nodes, not just references. The latter means that completing members for expressions (such as, casting an object or so). Should contain the changes in the function definitions but it is not working at the moment (the feature that the argument list is pre-filled with the parameter names and working like the template suggestions).
At the end of the day, I had to explore the weird world of rebasing as I did not really bother to learn it before. It’s because every time I’ve encounter with it, there was always a note that it could mess up things pretty badly, and some even says that it is like lying.
Rebasing in git is like to take a range of commits and “replay” them on the top of a branch or a specific revision. This is the perfect tool for the job I am about to perform. The work flow is like this: take the deviation point in my master branch, pick those commits that are relevant to the functionality, and apply them on the deviation point it self. Sounds almost too simple.
However, there are problems that I need to be aware. One is the problem with rewriting the history: I can’t re-base a tacking branch and expect that I can push it easily to its remote. Once I push a branch somewhere re-basing it is not an option anymore. So if that happens, and I screw up (like this happened with the first attempt to do this with the feature-static-library branch where I included commits that renders the branch virtually impossible to merge to bruno’s master), there’s no way back. The only thing I can do, if nobody hangs on my repository, that I wipe out the whole stuff and push the necessary branches from scratch. At the end of this exercise, this is likely to happen though. The only person I share my repository is bruno, and he doesn’t depend on any of my current branches.
That pesky file name capitalization is really annoying. If I want to switch to a branch that has the previous file name, I have to delete the file to get rid of the problem. Not only that, I ran in to this while I performed the rebase call, which is even more annoying as I have to fix to the right name with an additional commit.
Finally I mastered the rebasing so now there’s a new repository I’m working with. There are three feature branches so far: feature-static-libraries, feature-labelprovider-improvement, feature-antlr-parser. These branches were grown from the latest master from Bruno, so there should be no problem to merge them in to the main line.
