Re: [AD] Patch to thanks._tx and demo.c

[Evert Glebbeek <eglebbk@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 13 February 2005 21:01, Marcio Fialho wrote:
> These patchs solves many problems that were preventing some authors 
> (around 10) from appearing in the demo.exe credits.

Very cool! Thanks for spotting these problems and fixing them!

> In decreasing order of problem severity (most severe first), I did:
> - Fixed demo.c so every authors with " (email unknown)." after their 
> name will appear in the credits. (Up to now, demo.exe ignores every 
> author whose name is not followed by a " (<email>" string. Note the 
> blank space before '('  ).

I think it's probably ok to simply remove the space before the opening 
parenthesis in the demo.c file.

> - Removed some unnecessary blank spaces in the blank lines that 
> separates the author credits entries.

Be careful with doing that. I agree it is cleaner to do so, and it is 
probably ok in this case. In general, this screws up the ability to easily 
reverse previous patches or get diffs between one revision and another. I 
don't think it matters in this case, but it does for source files and 
possibly the documentation source.

>   - "Haruhiko Okumura" : His street address was being in the place of 
> his e-mail (I belive it was a very old record in thanks._tx). So I added 
> the (email unknown) after his name, to make him visible in the demo 
> game. But that would make the first line of his entry too long. I don't 
> know if this can lead to problems. So I moved his street address to the 
> last line of his entry. So now, his address will appear after his 
> contribution in the demo. Is this OK or we should think in another 
> solution? Simply delete his address doesn't seems to me to be a good 
> one, because then we would lost contact with him.

Frankly, I don't think many of the email addresses listed are still 
accurate either. It's probably ok to remove it - afterall, we don't know 
for a fact that he still lives there!
The docs used to list Shawn's postal address including a description of how 
to get there from the railwaystation. It's been removed though (I think it 
had its charm, even if it was hardly useful).

>   - "Julien Cugnière" and "Ville Skyttä" names aren't displayed 
> correctly in the demo program, because it doesn't recognises letters 
> with diacritical marks (accents).

Hmm... have you tried playing with the text encoding settings? I'm not sure 
we need to be that worried about this though...

>   - The file doesn't follow strict alphabetic order in the authors 
> names. e.g.: "Alex Demko" comes before "Alessandro Monopoli".

It would be better to change those around, I suppose. But again, I don't 
think it matters too much as long as it is mostly in alphabetical order.

> In case someone is interested, I've gathered some interesting statistics 
> with this job:
>    There are around 231 contributors listed in thanks._tx
>    Demo.exe took 36:43 (thirty six minutes and fourty three seconds) to 
> display all authors credits in a Celeron 450 MHz machine, with 96 MB of 
> RAM and a Intel 810 on-board graphics adapter, running in plain DOS (DOS 
> 7.10?  that comes with Windows 98 SE ), using the default graphics mode 
> and drawing technique.
>    This contribution costed around 6 man hours (including the time to 
> write this e-mail).

Interesting! :)

Again, thanks for your hard work!

Evert