Posts

Showing posts from March, 2021

A GitHub Code Archeology adventure

Image
At work, I am part of a team which maintains the Enthought Tool Suite (ETS). ETS includes a number of open source Python packages which are the foundation of the desktop applications we build at work. One of those packages is enable , a 2D drawing library. Yesterday, I came across this issue on enable regarding a python module ( kiva.fonttools.sstruct ) which wasn't used anywhere in the enable codebase at the moment. "... at the moment" is important here because the enable GitHub repository has been evolving for over 10 years now and we don't know if at some point in the past, kiva.fonttools.sstruct was used somewhere in enable. Before we decide on removing the python module from the codebase, we need to understand when it was added, who was using it and how and when the dependency on enable.fonttools.struct got removed from enable. Only then can we confidently remove the module without worrying about unexpected repurcussions. So, I started digging. The first thing