On Wednesday 26 October 2005 12:10 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote: > begin quoting boblq as of Wed, Oct 26, 2005 at 11:49:22AM -0700: > > On Tuesday 25 October 2005 08:59 am, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > > Writing your own XML parser that tries to put out meaningful error > > > messages is (a) seen as a waste of time as you're writing a redundant > > > parser and (b) is apt to be buggy and error-prone itself, making it > > > worse than what you have to deal with already. > > > > UH, duh. Isn't that one of the reasons why Open Source exists? > > Depends on who you are. Most folk want open-source because it results in > all software being (essentially) free-as-in-beer. > > > There are pretty decent parsers out there already, e.g. > > > > expat http://expat.sourceforge.net/ > > > > SAX http://www.saxproject.org/ > > > > You could contribute to these projects by improving the > > error reporting ... > > I haven't looked at these,
Odd, they are probably the most common XML parsers around. Strange if you are using/complaining about XML parsers that you would not have at least looked at them. > but most of the time when I look into > contributing to an open-source project, I end up first reformatting > all the code, correcting the spelling, adding some basic comments, all > of which results in an every-file diff and my contributions are rejected > with prejudice or just ignored. Maybe your contributions would be better focused on something other than reformatting and spell checking. > After a few times, it just isn't worth the effort anymore. Come on Stewart. Give me a break. Can you really not contribute without first reformatting everything? > Poking at 'em for a bit looks interesting, until I hit a sourceforge > bug (in a .py script). Oh, well, so much for that. You sure are an easy fellow to discourage. > > Why would you need to write your own XML parser? > > Often, good error reporting isn't something that can be bolted on to a > system afterwards. How do you know about these when you have not looked at them ... often? Maybe just once you should look at the code instead of blindly citing your prejudices. Too much to ask I guess. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
