So basically it's a couple of days I try to use a given piece of software. And for some unfathomable reason the thing does not do a specific thing which I need and it shall do. I'm not going to be more specific, because I do not want to point fingers.
The point is that it does not give any clues on why it is failing or what is exactly trying to do (thus "how" it is failing). Since the project is open source I decided to take the sources and hack my way to the problem. I have a rather good understanding on the domain that I'm going to solve (it's related to unix processes -- though in OS X environment --). I'm familiar with both.
It's been a while since I last wrote some Objective-C, but this time I should just look at the sources, perhaps set a couple of breakpoints and find out what is happening. My plan is that after that I could fix the source so that:
- It logs what is doing
- It logs any errors that occur
- Perhaps I fix the specific problem in the code
The first bad piece of new is that I spot some obvious software engineering mistakes in the software. Unfortunately it is stuff that needs more than a casual hacking to be fixed (specifically, I'm talking about configuration stuff hardcoded in the sources). Still, it is not probably a big issue. It may even make sense in some contexts… well, not really. But anyway. Some wrong data-structures… but everything is basically fine: the code, a part from that, is well written and rather clear.
So I localize the piece of code that fails. It does a bloody lot of magic, in my opinion. My guts tell me that some of it is just unnecessary, some better design could lead to much simpler and less magic code. The only problem is that sometimes such kludges are just a consequence of unorthogonal design of the underlying systems (in this case OS X). But that is something I would do later on, after simply adding the code that logs possible errors (I think that is of paramount importance for the semi-technical users of the software, in the sense that they could better understand what is going awry when they customize it).
Then a thought strikes me: compile the whole thing just before making modifications. The svn repo should have been left in compilable state… but no. It is not. So I should have to find the last point where it can be compiled. Which I could do… well, another time.
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