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Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

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Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#11

Post by peff »

pizza234 wrote: post #9
thenoblesunfish wrote: post #2

Anyone got a (git-based) one liner to get this info for an arbitrary repo?

You've asked for it ;) This prints the years - you can the group and plot them as you wish (it should be fairly easy, but I wrestled enough with git). It's a non-rigorous script (eg. it assumes nobody's email/name includes an `YYYY-MM-DD`-like string, and that filenames don't include the colon character): grep -P '\bTODO\b' -n -R -- * | awk -F: '{ system("git blame "$1" -L "$2","$2) }' | perl -lne 'print /(\d{4})-\d\…

What do you want `blame --porcelain` to do that it doesn't? Using:

    git blame --line-porcelain "$1" -L "$2,"$2" |
    perl -MPOSIX=strftime -lne '/^author-time (\d+)/ and print strftime("%Y", localtime($1))'
I suppose it would be a little more convenient if you could ask `git blame` to format the whole line itself, but that wouldn't be part of the `--porcelain` output.

All that said, that pipeline is quite slow on something like linux.git, as it runs a series of blames which will walk over the same history many times. I think:

    git log -STODO --format=%ad --date=short
would be much faster (it's not _quite_ the same thing, as it counts TODOs which went away, but is a reasonable variant).

Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#15

Post by mnahkies »

mekkkkkk wrote: post #10

The growing number is hardly surprising, yet I don't know exactly what the implications are. There are a lot of different categories of TODOs, ranging from harmless ("it would be nice if this was improved at some point") to critical ("this is a really bad solution that needs to be fixed ASAP"). I wonder if these repos has official definitions of what a TODO entails.

Perhaps we should be including a priority in such comments, eg:

TODO: high: don't use bogosort

Would only be useful if it became a defacto standard though

Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#17

Post by pizza234 »

peff wrote: post #11
pizza234 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've asked for it ;) This prints the years - you can the group and plot them as you wish (it should be fairly easy, but I wrestled enough with git). It's a non-rigorous script (eg. it assumes nobody's email/name includes an `YYYY-MM-DD`-like string, and that filenames don't include the colon character): grep -P '\bTODO\b' -n -R -- * | awk -F: '{ system("git blame "$1" -L "$2","$2) }' | perl -lne 'print /(\d{4})-\d\…

What do you want `blame --porcelain` to do that it doesn't? Using: git blame --line-porcelain "$1" -L "$2,"$2" | perl -MPOSIX=strftime -lne '/^author-time (\d+)/ and print strftime("%Y", localtime($1))' I suppose it would be a little more convenient if you could ask `git blame` to format the whole line itself, but that wouldn't be part of the `--porcelain` output. All that said, that pipeline is quite slow on somethi…

> What do you want `blame --porcelain` to do that it doesn't? Using:

It increases the complexity, due to time conversion. One can certainly solve the general problem by throwing enough awk/perl/sed at it, but an option to customize the blame output would make it significantly more ergonomic (and the oneliner much simpler).

Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#18

Post by dep_b »

Just today I announced a sweep through all of the TODO's and to either turn them into issues, stories or remove them. Biggest problem in Xcode is that it clogs up the warning list and the real warnings get swamped by them. But it's funny to see that Rust has less outstanding TODO's than our brand new 45KLoC project.

Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#19

Post by AJRF »

I was just thinking the other day that searching for TODO is probably a very good way to search a project for potential bugs or security issues. E.g; I see a bunch of todos in Firebase iOS SDK that look kind of interesting to an attacker. Without looking into how the methods are called I can't say if they are actually exploitable (and I am sure Firebase is fuzzed to high-hell) but it was a little seed planted in my head.

Re: Plotting the source code “TODO” history of the most popular open source projects

#20

Post by esyir »

mnahkies wrote: post #15
mekkkkkk wrote: post #10

The growing number is hardly surprising, yet I don't know exactly what the implications are. There are a lot of different categories of TODOs, ranging from harmless ("it would be nice if this was improved at some point") to critical ("this is a really bad solution that needs to be fixed ASAP"). I wonder if these repos has official definitions of what a TODO entails.

Perhaps we should be including a priority in such comments, eg: TODO: high: don't use bogosort Would only be useful if it became a defacto standard though

At that point, make an issue and add it to the tracker.
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