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                          Working on legacy projects

The Corporate Overlords have assigned me to maintain “Project: Bradenburg.”
It's a project my department is responsible for, but I never worked on it. It
was written by fellow team member JC  who left last year [1], and the person
who was supposed to maintain it (he was assigned to our team shortly after JC
left) also left this year. So now it's my turn.

Woot! Legacy code!

Unlike the rest of our code base, “Project: Bradenburg” expects to run on a
modern 64-bit Linux system. Okay, cool! I get to learn about running Linux VM
(Virtual Machine)s on an Apple Mac book (only took two days, and constant
reminders to myself not to throw the laptop across the room, to get the VM
installed and running).

Then I attempted to build the system, and that's when I learned the Linux
system I'm running is a bit too modern. It took some hacking to get the code
compiled, and I'm concerned about how best to integrate the changes I have
with the build system.

I'm also learning why people hate make. I've never really got the hate,
because I never found make all that difficult to use (especially GNU Make [2]
I find it quite nice to use). But diving into “Project: Bradenburg” really
has me questioning JC's … um … design asthetic when it comes to make. I was
able to replace six Makefiles comprising a total of 700 lines, with one
Makefile of 197 lines, 150 of which comprise the dependency list
(automatically generated—leaving 47 lines to do the actual building). I'm
sure the Makefile will grow a bit (to cover building a release versus a debug
build) but not 500 more lines.

Another thing I'm working on is finding out not only who uses “Project:
Bradenburg,” but how they're using it. I know the Corporation uses it, but I
do know that JC was working with our Corporate Overlords to have it used
elsewhere. I want to rip some stuff out if it (like the internal stack
tracing mechanism) but I first want to know if anyone uses the stuff I want
to remove.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2020/11/23.1
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/make/

Email author at [email protected]

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