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

Post by schleiss » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

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

Post by _kbh_ » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:22 AM UTC

AJRF wrote: post #19

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 h…

Post by cerved » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #2

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

  git --no-pager grep -I --full-name --line-number 'TODO' |\
   sed 's/\(^[^:]*\):\([0-9]\+\):.*/\1\n\2/' |\
   xargs -d '\n' -n2 sh -c 'git --no-pager blame "$0" -L $1,$1'

Post by spockz » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:46 AM UTC

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

Post by the_duke » Mon, May 17, 2021, 9:58 AM UTC

dep_b wrote: post #18

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.