How many FIXMEs do the various projects in my jhbuild directory have? Curiosity got the better of me today:
hpj [~/work/jhbuild/gnome-2.16] for PKG in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type d | cut -b 3- | sort); do N_FIXME=$(find $PKG -iregex ‘.*.(c|h|py|cpp|cc|hh|cs)$’ -exec grep -i FIXME {} ; | wc -l); printf “% 5d %sn” $N_FIXME $PKG; done | sort -n -r
718 evolution
444 evolution-data-server
429 gtk+
151 gstreamer
148 gtkhtml
147 nautilus
146 gst-plugins-base
125 gnome-vfs
123 ORBit2
107 gst-plugins-good
104 mozilla
89 metacity
…and so on. Try it yourself!
I expect these come in all difficulty levels – from the usually quite easy “should I free this?” to the harder “oh my god I’ve painted myself into a corner and need to re-architect a large chunk of the program”. Some will be worth fixing, others will not. The good thing is that they pinpoint potential problems for free, without having to run a debugger. Something for those oh-so-frequent idle moments?