bugfixes

[Kasper Peeters <t16@nikhef.nl>]

Hi there,

I'm just back from my 2 week hiking vacation in Scotland, and ready
to start on Mnemonic again. 

I've been reading through Andrew's MP doc and the changes in the CVS.
Good work. Together with the Filter things, we're getting to a stage
where many of the conceptual problems have been solved.

As has been mentioned a couple of times on IRC lately, it's getting time
for some bugfixing. I'm proposing the following.

   1. Freeze the code (no more new features).
 
   2. Merge in the rest of the message passing code along the lines
      of what Andrew did. If we run into conceptual problems, stick to
      the old situation and work on those problems at a later stage.

   3. Merge in the OM code (joev's things; again, leave conceptual problems
      until after bugfixing).

   4. Have a limited number of people do the bugfixing (most of it
      is alloc/free and null point stuff), let's say 2 or 3. Wait with
      all further changes until the code is reasonably free from
      segfaults.

   5. Write coding guidelines (who's responsible for freeing allocated
      memory, how do we handle exceptions, etc.) while doing the
      bugfixes.

I guess Andrew and Joe should be able to tell if (possibly with some
help) we can finish 2 and 3 within, let's say, a week, if we do not
include any new features and stick to the design as we have it right
now. I'm volunteering to spend a full day doing the debugging after
that.

Kasper