[COFF] Code/comment Ratios Style

[Paul Winalski]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 6:26 PM josh <joshnatis0 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Monday, July 21, 2025, Chet Ramey via COFF <coff at tuhs.org> wrote:
>
>> On 7/21/25 11:27 AM, Paul Winalski wrote:
>>
>>> When writing all but the most trivial bug fixes I always put in a
>>> comment referring to the bug report number.  This helps with what can
>>> otherwise be a perplexing problem:  "why is this bit of code there?"
>>>
>>
>> I put those in the change log entries.
>>
>
> Does anyone else feel like this is still an unsolved problem?
>
> Yes.  Change tracking is just one facet of the larger problem of source
code control and configuration management.  The first change tracking
programs such as SCCS and DEC CMS tracked changes on a per-file basis.  If
a change set involved more than one file, you had to track that information
elsewhere.  Later change tracking systems added the concept of a change set.


> There is a lot to say about a change which would be extraneous to include
> in the code as comments — real-world context (as mentioned), trade-offs
> considered / why specific implementation decisions were made, explanation
> and annotation, potential future steps, testing/validation, and even rich
> media demonstrating things that may be hard to express in text.[1]
>
> In the shops I've worked at we used our bug-tracking system for that. At
DEC we created pseudo-"bugs" in the tracking system for new development.
That way all of the information about what was changed and why was in one
place.

-Paul W.
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