for review: fixing bart's complaints about MERCURY_OPTIONS
Zoltan Somogyi
zs at cs.mu.OZ.AU
Mon Aug 10 14:34:27 AEST 1998
> Not knowing what "reviewing a change" means within the
> mercury-developers, I read through what you send; skipped the stuff
> that had no meaning for me and arrived at the following petty
> comments:
Reviewing a change means
- checking whether you understand everything in the change; if you don't,
ask for clarification;
- checking whether you agree that the change is correct, i.e. does not
introduce new bugs and that (a) if the change is a new feature, the feaure
works (which usually requires a test case), or (b) if the change is a bug
fix, the changes fixes all occurrences of the bug.
A review may also contain suggestions for material, performance or stylistic
improvements.
BTW, what was the stuff without meaning?
> + at c @item --heap-zone-size=@var{size}
> + at c Sets the size of the redzone on the heap to @var{size} kilobytes.
>
> since you are being verbose already, why not as option:
>
> --heap-redzone-size=@var{size}
Done.
> the current user's guide doesn't mention "redzone" (unless I
> overlooked it)
That's deliberate. The options that control the redzone are for implementors
of Mercury only. They are not documented in user-accessible places (the @c
is the texinfo comment character).
> maybe it is worth mentioning somewhere why someone might want to set a
> redzone size and what the effect is ?
The reason why the redzone is not documented is that this explanation
must be too low level, and would confuse rather than help non-implementors.
> no idea how much work this would be ... if the user gave as
> non-existing option "blabla", then a message like:
>
> The MERCURY_OPTIONS environment variable
> contains "blabla" which is not an option.
> Please refer ...
>
> is more user friendly.
OK, done.
See, that's two respects in which your comments have improved the change.
Maybe the HAL group should adopt reviews as well :-)
Zoltan.
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