Built-in "fix me" alarms in source code

Several times during development, it makes sense not to fully implement all of the features of a particular function and just leave a stub that gets your code to compile. Somewhere in the comments, I usually put "fixme" so that it is easy to find again later when I finish everything else.

However, as time passes, sometimes you don't remember to search for all the "fixme"s and these can creep into production builds.

A simple hack is to put time bombs in your code that refuse to compile after a certain time has elapsed, ie like 2 weeks.

In your prebuild hook, write something that writes a time stamp to a header file, like this:

#! c:/perl/bin/perl

use POSIX;
open F,">buildtime.h" or die;
print F POSIX::strftime(qq{#define BUILDTIME %Y%m%d\n},localtime);

Then in your code, put in hooks like this:

#include "buildtime.h"
#if BUILDTIME > 20090125
#error Fix this bug
#endif

where the time stamp is simply the concatenation of year, month and day (YYYYMMDD), in that order to get the greater-than comparison to work. In my example, the code will refuse to build after Jan 25, 2009.