Roto Till

Actually spelled without an interior capital: 'rototill'. This is a term I picked up from the NetBsd project, though I've heard it used elsewhere. (It's not in the JargonFile, so it can't be all that popular, I suppose.)

To rototill a piece of code is to make extensive and pervasive changes to it that don't usually change the functionality but do change (often greatly) the way it works. It's sort of a refactoring, I suppose. Often this is done because the code has degraded so badly over a period of time that the fear of introducing new bugs with the rewrite has been overcome by despair that the current code can ever be made to work well.

The term comes from the motorised cultivators known as 'rototillers'. You can find some pictures of them at http://www.homestead.com/rototiller4/Rototiller.html .

-- CurtSampson

CategoryJargon