referencing comment

[monte]

What's this for?

[LCMark]

It's just a convention that helps document history in the source - means we can find the main code relating to a particular feature by doing a global find. Similar for bug fixes.

[monte]

Right but how do you know what to search for if you haven't found the comment yet?

[LCMark]

Heh - well it does presuppose you know what you are looking for - but once you've found one reference it means you can do a global find to search for any other (critical) places that the implementation of that feature touched by searching for the tag. It can be a useful aid, that's all.

(A better example is 'the properties' changes that are pending - this involved modifying the signature of a method in MCObject to add an 'effective' var, by referencing that change it will mean it's easy to see why that signature was changed and where it was (initially) used).

[monte]

Ah... so you find one comment and you search for all other comments with that tag? I thought you might have some database somewhere... git blame would be more reliable because you can see exactly who's done what then go and look at individual commits and logs to see changes and messages. But I guess you want something that you can spot while working and quickly search...

[LCMark]

Yes - it is just a quick aid while working in the source - it's usually quicker to do a global find for things rather than go digging through the scm logs (or git blame). Although, with using git now it might become less necessary as features and bug-fixes are being integrated as independent branches. Something that wasn't quite so easy with SVN...