Hi Cyril,
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 10:21:21PM +0200, Cyril Bonté wrote:
> > What we need is an automatic converter for various formats. Some very
> > nice conversions were posted something like one year ago, which were
> > almost automatic but unfortunately nobody had time to takeover the
> > project and continue on this work.
>
> Yes, I still have this in my TODO list but couldn't find time to cleanup the
> process : the code was really too awfull and unreadable to be published :-)
> I'll try to restart this development as soon as possible and submit a minimal
> version of the converter. Then it will be possible to enhance it
> incrementally.
Believe me, you should never ever feel ashamed of any work you find ugly,
especially when there are people who are actively asking for it. If some
users are that much waiting for seeing it, probably that as soon as it's
published, a few ones will take it, review it, and perform the cleanup
way before you find enough time to work on it. Maybe a few ones will totally
fork it believing it's crap and they can do something much better. Maybe
they'll be right, maybe they'll fail. It doesn't matter.
I know how you feel about what it's like to publish ugly things (hint: there
are a lot of even uglier things on 1wt.eu/tools/ that I accepted to publish
because people were asking for them). But those ugly things are often useful
to people who don't pay attention to the appearance, and who sometimes will
be a lot less critical than you on your work.
Haproxy was started as something ugly 10 years ago. Some would say that the
ugliness has remained or even increased. Still, opening it has tremendously
helped improving it. Git is another example of something that started ugly
by one tech guy with strong requirements, quickly taken over by a team who
made it much more user-friendly, promoting it to the success we know.
I'd say that there could be three reasons for not publishing it too fast :
- you did that work in a context of a paid job and you're not certain you
have the right to publish it ;
- you fear that you have sensitive info that you'd like not to disclose
(eg: comments about one customer you started the work for, etc...) ;
- you think that only you can understand how your code works and you fear
that it will be much more work to explain someone else how to do the
cleanup than doing it yourself.
I remember having seen examples of what you managed to produce and was really
impressed. I also remember about another older one which produced great
results but I don't remember from whom. Anyway, that means to me that it's
hard for everyone to find time to work on such a project, and this is another
reason to ask for help. Just keep in mind that you must find the license that
suits your expectations the most, and possibly emit strong opinions on some
directions you want it to take.
Best regards,
Willy
