Will the development continue?

[liquidscorpio]

The last commit reported is from April 2013 and there have been no interactions in issues either. Is there something (other than low-level programming) that can be done to revive it.

I really want MT3 to see the day light. 🌞

[irrenhaus3]

I've cloned this repo a while ago and I can kind of see why development died down on MT3 - the code is a giant bowl of spaghetti with very little documentation, there are function macros all over the place and there are a lot of custom implementations of sort algorithms, MD5 and so on. It's really more oldschool C than C++. Over all, not very pretty to maintain and refactor.
I'm currently going through every file, documenting each and every function and class, just to understand what's happening. Maybe I can contribute something worthwile once I understand this baby a little bit better.

[flibitijibibo]

It's really more oldschool C than C++.

Bingo.

MT3, from what I understand, is basically MT2 moved over to C++. This is basically why the code is incredibly difficult to read and still has things like asm routines... any sort of design that might have existed basically got thrown out by the move to C++, since it's essentially shoving one design into a largely incompatible language (as far as design goes).

This is probably why MT3 doesn't even really exist, because the move to C++ either didn't work at all or it didn't perform as well as the original, so we've got this different model of code development that also didn't work very well (it's hard to port something that never worked in the first place... I'm in the middle of doing something similar right now).

[liquidscorpio]

So how to breathe life into this project? I have tried a few FOSS alternatives, but the experience is not the same as MT2. In as much as, I would like to build an alternative, I have near zero understanding of inner workings of a tracker.

If this is not the code base that appeals to reason, then let us try to work a reasonable, even if, feature limited alternative.

I do not know if this would be a sane thing to do, given that there already is a (somewhat?) working code base. But then again, I do not really know how much this code will allow to be build upon nor do I know where to start if I want to start a fresh.

[AmEv7Fam]

I might be able to bring some life back into this project.

I've been gone for 2 years (I'll leave that to your imagination as to why), but I've learned a good chunk of Python in the meantime. I know, it's not a boatload similar to C(++), but I feel it should be able to help...

Now, I don't know how much time I'm going to be able to spend on this, especially with other responsibilities, but I'll see what I can do...

[AmEv7Fam]

Ouch. Forgot how bayad this code was in some places.

I do remember poking it at it a while ago, but ended up being royally confused as to what everything does.

I do remember we were in the process of removing duplicate code, but I can't remember how far Flibit and I got.

I'm wondering if the old SVN repo has some info we can splice out of it?

In the meantime, what I can do is get Travis, etc. set up, so that I don't have to fiddle with my buildbox, since I kinda messed it up 2 years ago, and family used the box for gaming (not that I'm complaining, of course, but constant random prodding by a brother who thinks similarly to you doesn't exactly help clean things up).

(Lesson learned: there is clearly a "wrong way" to "upgrade" WinXP to Win7/10 x64...)

[irrenhaus3]

I gotta say, going through this code and trying to understand it is akin to exploring the cursed tomb of an ancient egyptian ruler. It's nasty, full of booby traps and horrible things, but you really learn a thing or two about the thought process of the architect and how the entire thing even holds together. I'm having one epiphany after the other and I'm starting to get the first ideas of how to tackle the big refactor - at least for some of the more general features that could easily be abstracted by the platform-independant features of C++11 and things like boost::filesystem. I'll report status updates whenever I feel they're worthwhile.

[AmEv7Fam]

OK, Travis is up and running. For the most part, at least.

I'm going to poke at the SVN repo to see how the program evolved. I may not be able to fully write functioning C(++) yet, but if I can scrape Yannick's head from 15 years ago, that might be able to help us out.

[AmEv7Fam]

This still continues to be my biggest complaint: the MTfooNUMBER file system.

Problem is, we can't just merge the files, as that really wouldn't fix the problem.

@irrenhaus3, think you could get some commenting done as to what you find, and how things work?

[AmEv7Fam]

Poking at it again.

Ugh, the 2nd biggest issue is the obscure naming. I think what would help a lot is if we can figure out what the names are supposed to be/do, that would help a lot.

[AmEv7Fam]

Yet again.

Travis is up and running, and compiling for us now.

It looks like some of the functions that are being done are built into modern versions of the C(++) compilers.

Lemme find the link for the Windows-compiled MT3. I know I've got it somewhere, but it does show the code compiled at some point...

[AmEv7Fam]

OK, I've opened the Wiki up, so that we can contribute our notes as to what does what.

[irrenhaus3]

I mean, compiling this monster isn't really too bad, my GCC reliably builds it. It's the immediate segfaults that kinda get to me :D.
My MO right now is to occasionally sit down and go through some parts of the code, committing my changes to a private repo so I don't meddle too much. I'm not only commenting, but making first small changes like replacing MTColor with a more sane version or commenting out completely unused functions. And I think there was an operator= overload somewhere that did nothing different from the default operator= except that it returned bool. Things like that.
If that sounds like something I should push to a branch of this repo, let me know.

[AmEv7Fam]

Let's do a separate branch for now...

[AmEv7Fam]

OK, I've created the breaktofix branch for now, so we can mess around with the code without overly polluting the main branch.

[irrenhaus3]

That's pretty sweet. Can you give me write access to that branch?