How Maintainable Is the Firefox Codebase?

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How Maintainable Is the Firefox Codebase?

Posted by Unknown on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @04:41AM from the self-referential-fox dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A report released this morning looks at the maintainability level of the Firefox codebase through five measures of architectural complexity. It finds that 11% of files in Firefox are highly interconnected, a value that went up significantly following version 3.0 and that making a change to a randomly selected file can, on average, directly impact eight files and indirectly impact over 1,400 files. All the data is made available and the report comes with an interactive Web-based exploratory tool." The complexity exploration tool is pretty neat.

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So? by ShanghaiBill · 2013-05-15 04:56 · Score: 5, Insightful

It finds that 11% of files in Firefox are highly interconnected
Figures like this would be more useful if they were put in context. What is a "normal" level for connectedness? What is the level for the Linux kernel, or for GCC? Compared to other similar sized projects, is 11% good or bad?
1. Re:So? by hedwards · 2013-05-15 04:59 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  Normal probably isn't so useful here, but it would give some context. 11% of files being highly interconnected could be a sign of incompetence on the part of the developers, or it could be a sign that they're engaged in sound design by splitting off commonly used methods into their own files and treating them as libraries.
  I'd suspect that the latter is the case here.
2. Re:So? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-05-15 05:59 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Not only that. The number is entirely meaningless, if we don't know *how* they are interconnected.
  If they are interconnected through a well-defined and stable interface, they can be connected as much as they want... it doesn't matter!
  What counts is the *modularity*! How much can you treat everything as independent modules? How much can you change the *implementation* without causing trouble.
  Because if they are cleanly separated that way, they are no different from being completely separate projects or programs.
  It's when things become "frameworks" that all the alarm bells go off.
Re:Fork by hedwards · 2013-05-15 05:01 · Score: 4, Insightful

You know that you don't have to load things in tabs if you don't want to, right? And I highly doubt that you're going to have any meaningful performance improvements by loading up different windows. Plugins are there for every browser and the worst offenders tend to be things like Flash which aren't always easily avoided. Extentions themselves aren't usually a problem if you don't install badly behaving ones. And many of them do actually help out with performance, noscript anybody?
Lots of pretty numbers... by DrStrangluv · 2013-05-15 05:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

... that have no meaning at all.
Impacting 8 files on average would be horrible... for a project with 8 files. But how many is that relative to the size of Firefox?
11% of files in Firefox are highly interconnected... but how does that compare to other projects of similar scope?
The one value in that summary that had any meaning at all was the comment that the percentage of interconnected files "went up significantly following version 3.0". That at least has some relative measure we can use as a base.
Re:Um, you forgot to go AC when you trolled. by NotBorg · 2013-05-15 05:59 · Score: 3, Insightful

Hasn't that been played out yet?
Nope. Trolls echo forever.

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