Ansification of X.Org code & other cleanup work

[Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade]

Alan Coopersmith wrote:
> From a comment in a patch Peter recently submitted:
>> libXpm is one of the libraries that still could need ANSIfication,
>> 	I'd offer some help if you tell me to do so.

  It is not "ansified", but it doesn't have problematic functions,
i.e. K&R prototypes with char/short/float arguments/return-type
like libX11. But libX11 has it only on non public or hard to get
access to, locale related functions.

> And this has come up on #xorg-devel recently and in patches submitted by
> Paulo in the past...(and probably a couple times a year since we started
> X.Org)...
>
> In general, I think everyone agrees conversion of the remaining bits
> of code that use K&R/pre-ANSI-C89 style function prototypes & declarations
> to C89 is a good thing (provided it's done correctly [1]), but that none
> of the people doing most of the work on Xorg have much time to help with it.
> The same applies to much other "janitorial" type work, like cleaning up
> gcc warnings and all the bugs with the janitor keyword ([2]), and all the
> patches sitting in bugzilla ([3]) or the mailing list archives.  We get patches
> submitted by people like Paulo & Peter, and while some of us try to get through
> the backlog in our spare time, the backlog of them grows faster than we can get
> time to get through them.

  xorg/app/<old-xt-xaw-applications> is a good place to "practice" 
ansification :-)

> I'd really like to encourage the people who want to tackle these issues to get
> someone to help them apply their first few patches, then apply for git commit
> access so you can commit them directly, because if you wait for the few of us
> trawling the submitted patches to get to them, many of your patches will be
> uselessly out-of-sync with the code by the time we get to them and you'll be
> seeing those errors for months or longer until we do.

  I closed most "ansification" bugreports opened by me, as I was not sure it
was intended to actually work on it; I only applied patches that actually
corrected real problems. The patches should still be available, on the
closed bug reports (at some point I think I had like 50 of these patches 
open).
  One place that I did not submit patches was the X Server, as I wanted it
to be done after having my "visibility" patches applied first, as those,
while not adding a "real visible functionality" add the oportunity to have
a more clean sdk, with only what is expected to be visible by outside
modules, actually visible, and all the other benefits :-)

> If someone wanted to organize a "janitorial squad" to tackle these and help
> new people work through them to get to the point where they were ready for
> commit access, we'd love you forever (or at least until you turn us down
> when we then volunteer you to be the next release manager).
>
> [1] http://invisible-island.net/ansification/index.html
> [2] 41 open bugs:
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=janitor&product=Xorg&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED
> [3] 122 open bugs, though many patches aren't keyworded:
> http://bugs.freedesktop.org/buglist.cgi?keywords=patch&product=Xorg&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=REOPENED
>   

Paulo