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by Ben Hosking.
Original Post: To fix my problem, I did nothing
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I had a interesting few days trying to fix this bug. We are not quite sure which of the millions of changes is responsible for the overview map not working. The overview map is a small zoomed out map of the current map. The piece of functionality works 2 releases ago but now doesn't. Obviously there have been a lot of changes that have been put in. I have spent the last few days trying to fix this problem but in the end I told someone who has changed quite a few things and he snuck off and then said he had changed something. It now works a lot better.
I can tell the code is in poor state because regardless of code smells http://hoskinator.blogspot.com/2006/05/smells-to-refactoring-cheat-sheet.html is that I'm terrified to change any of the code. A lot of the code is complete voodoo magic with bizarre activity going on all over the place. There are a couple of instances where functions are called twice and I'm not entirely sure why and when you ask anyone else they are not sure why either. I'm afraid I'm too much of a wimp to take it out (this late in the week) because it is in some core classes used by often .
At the moment all map objects are treated the same, this has it's advantages with no need for lots of if's etc. I thought about trying to find a way to treat the overview map differently but in the end it would involve a lot of if statements or a major refactoring. In the end I have had to give up on the. Idea, which is a bit unsatisfying but I haven't got the time. The positives I can take from this is that the bug is fixed now and I feel like I have had a warning for some coding to come and at least I will be better prepared for the challenges that lie ahead in the legacy code jungle. Right I'm off to sharpen my machete.
So after a few days bug fixing I have made zero changes but feel glad that I have got out alive and without putting any more bugs in. It's probably only in programming that you can get stuck like these for a few days.
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