I will first talk about what is debug.pike and then explain my task and then the solution.
Debug.pike gives the user a pike prompt with all the constants from the sTeam client. It is like a self programmable pike client for the sTeam server. All the client side variable are available using which the user can write pike code to interact with the sTeam server. Steam-shell was built on top of this and has functions that perform common actions using these variables.
My task was to build a function to allow re-login as different users. I had worked with the code for connection to the sever and the login part while working on my second task. My second task was to implement TLS and thus I was familiar with the functions available and how COAL was working.
Implementing TLS: https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/issues/47
First I tried the code for my function on the prompt of debug.pike itself. My plan of action was to logout the current user and restart the connection. However the logout function gave me a lot of troubles. On logging out I was losing the connection to the server and was not able to establish it back even with the connect_server() function, which establishes a connection between the server and the client. Breaking up the problem I devised a solution for the problem without logging out, that is, calling the login again without logging out.
After calling the function login() when I was unable to get any results I realized that I will have to reset all the variable values that get set during the first login. I moved all the variable initializations to init and called this function after login and the problem was solved. The temporary solution was working fine. I also realized that the logout function was giving me troubles because I was not re-initializing all the variables. So now I was also able to logout and my solution was complete.
My next task was to improve the code. The initialization and the login part of the code was repeated throughout several files with minor changes. I had to bring out the common part put it in a separate file and then inherit. The files I changed were:
- steam-shell.pike
- debug.pike
- edit.pike
I shifted all the uncommon parts to the main of the respective files and then included the common file called client.pike
Now again after this I went back to my previous task and standardized the init function as I had changed it a lot and this would have given a merge conflict later.