GSoC11 - Outliner Code Cleaned Up!

This afternoon I spent some time cleaning up the code for the Outliner. Since its inception back in 2004 for 2.35, it has practically all resided in a single file: outliner.c

While back then, this was pretty "normal" (well, if can call a single directory, with some many files that you end up having trouble linking it sometimes on some platforms). However, now with the 2.5 code layout, we can afford to have code spread out in far more files, as each editor has its own little module now.



Which brings us to the core reason for this whole cleaning up.

While working on some additional features for the Outliner last week, the weight of recent growth over the past few years started catching up with it. You see, by having everything in a single file, we had a file that was 160 kb.

Typically, most other rather large files in our codebase are around 80kb, and even then, they are starting to get on the "could be hard to manage scale" (BTW, there's another even riper candidate for refactoring in a similar fashion: readfile.c, which on last check weighs in at over 300 kb - mostly due to the version patching code, which only ever gets longer with each release we make). I've heard/read in the past about some religious types who jump up and down when any single code file gets larger than ~20 kb IIRC, and I don't think that figure was for py code either ;)

The main issue when a single file contains this much code, is that it starts getting hard to navigate the file. Working on it may start even getting slow (BTW, readfile.c is reaching that point). In the case of outliner.c, the sheer volume of functions and number of long functions was taking its toll. Some developers had (I'm assuming) gotten to the point where they couldn't see the structure of the layout of the functions anywhere, and wound up sticking code in weird places (i.e. right in the middle of a chunk of related functions) making it bloody hard to actually find what you're hunting for, as certain functions started having a "knack" for managing to hide amongst their murky surroundings. Not to mention the cases where spaghetti was emerging and/or prototypes needing to get used to avoid weird linking order issues imposed by having only a single way to order everything.

Unravelling some of the mess this afternoon was quite hellish actually. Doing an initial split: no problem. Getting that to compile: aarrrrrggggh!!!!!!