As you probably already know we are getting close to the first developer preview of the Unicode-compatible LiveCode 7. It’s very exciting for me personally, as I have been working on this in one way or another since I started here in November 2012. I knew there was a lot to do, but suffice it to say that at the time I didn’t realise quite how much! In many ways it has been the perfect introduction to the LiveCode engine for me – a not-so-whistlestop tour around all the areas touched on by the refactoring project, which is to say almost all of it.
One of the challenges of maintaining the refactored engine is keeping it up to date, by continually merging in new bug fixes and features. It can already be a little tricky to resolve merge conflicts when so much of the engine has changed, but in many cases code has been moved from its original location to a new file. Sometimes this can result in code getting merged automatically into blocks of code that are no laonger executed, so we’ve had to come up with a system to ensure than any updates which land in the old location are flagged up.
Challenged by Ben to come up with a name for this system, I opted for syntax caravan- the idea being that the syntax branch is diverging from the main branch (going on holiday), but needs to keep being updated on what the main branch is doing (needs to bring the main branch in a caravan). Ok it doesn’t quite work as an analogy, but I was thinking fast and I was asked to be cryptic! It’s a bit snappier than ‘the occasional telephone call from master to tell syntax what it is up to’.
Here is a screenshot of the tool written by Seb which shows the syntax caravan in action:
click image for full size preview
You can see that the usePixelScaling property, and a change to the pixelScale property, have been happily merged by Git. Unfortunately the active version of that code now resides in a completely different file. Thanks to the syntax caravan we can ensure that none of these things get lost in the merge. It shouldn’t be too long now before the syntax branch comes home, and we can put the caravan away for good. Or at least until the next engine overhaul…
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