Project idea: Commit safety for developers

Submitted by Jacob Singh on

The problem

Programmers are like bad criminals in cop movies.  We just like to leave clues everywhere.  Most of the time, we work much like writers, from the outside in.  Develop an outline, stub out the parts which we might get to, and then fill in the core pieces, followed by the extremities.  If you're lucky you get a quick review and edit and then off to the press.  

Often though, we leave in little todo messages like "@todo: Actually write this function" or "@todo: make sure you check for a security hole here".  Or unprofessional error messages like "oops, something didn't work" or even worse "idiotic user doesn't know how to read instructions and forgot to use lower case".  And sometimes, I've been guilty of leaving debug code in which is there for me to look at what is happening in the code, but should never be accessed by others.

In my 13 years of reading other peoples' code, I don't think I'm alone here.

Ever seen "An unexpected error has occurred" or "Oops, shouldn't have gotten here" in an application... yeah, the dev needed this.

The proposal

An extension to your version control system of choice and/or your continious integration tool which checked code for various patterns and stopped commits from going in, or releases from going out based on those patterns.  It would require a little learning, but I could train myself to write "NOCOMMIT: This is a fake error message" where required.  And then adding in the debugging commands for different frameworks and languages wouldn't be too hard.

Just a nice small utility to prevent those accidental screw ups which can be expensive mistakes later on.

If you'd use something like this +1 in the comments or twitter.

I will most likely not be coding this up, but if someone does, please post a link here as a comment.

 

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Comments

Should be easy: in your git

Should be easy: in your git pre-commit hook, just do something to the effect of `grep -lR NOCOMMIT *`, and if you get anything back, make the commit fail. In any git repository, you can look in .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample to see how it would work.

Yeah, I didn't say it was

Jacob Singh's picture

Submitted by Jacob Singh on

Yeah, I didn't say it was hard :)

But it would be nice to have a project which had presets for different frameworks, allowed you to override it, showed you nicely formatted lists, etc...

Something everyone would just turn on because "why not".

Good One...

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It might be able to at least

AnnaD's picture

Submitted by AnnaD (not verified) on

It might be able to at least prevent bringing in the breaking commits using a pre-update hook on whatever shared repository you all push to. It can look for commits that modify the config file made by certain developers, or it can look for commits touching that file that don't mention for special keyword in the live chat download message.

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