Old code never dies. Unless you personally go and destroy every repository, backup, and website that ever mentions it, it will come back to haunt you. As proof- I offer up my debugging library.
Back in college, I was a cocky, know-it-all programmer who had never worked on anything more than a few thousand lines of code (as differentiated from now, where only the first two things are true). At that time, after having various issues with memory allocation, I wrote a quick debugging library in C++, mainly around finding and documenting leaks. It worked, with its limitations. At the time I thought it was clever. Now- dear god is it a hackfest. I didn't really know what I was doing when I did it. Fast forward 8 years. A month ago, I get an email from Google saying that someone wanted to start a project on gforge with the same name as a project of mine on sourceforge- the debug library. Now I made a very common name for it (this was early on in sourceforge history, good names were available), so I figured it was just the name. Not having touched the code in 8 years, I of course said sure and gave up the name- I figured there was no way anyone would ever be using my old code. That was until this morning. I got an email (isn't it great having the same email for a decade) with an indian sender's name and the subject "hi". I assume its spam, but open it anyway just in case. And much to my surprise- its someone talking about programming. Specifically, my library. With technical questions. Dear god, he's actually using it?!?!?! This of course makes me curious. So I quickly google the library's name, and look at the project page. Its actually at the 74% activity rating. I guess the fact it actually hit version 1.01 (fixing the bug in version 1.0 where I skipped every other element in a list) must have made people hopeful. Despite not having any files in CVS (did sf do CVS back then?) there was a source tarball. In 8 years, over 1000 people have downloaded this piece of shit. Although 1/3 of them have read the readme, realised it sucked, and never downloaded the code. So here it is- proof that old code never dies. Any suggestions on how to deal with the support request? Just for fun, so you can all mock the 20 year old me, here's a list of the "features" of my library. *Special license, because GPL wasn't good enough- GPL with a disclaimer disallowing for profit redistribution. I assume nobody is listening to that. In fact, I assume they probably aren't following the GPL either. I hearby waive the non-profit requirement. I'll keep it GPL, but likely not run after anyone breaking it. *"Funny" copyright line. Complete with typo. *My own linked list class. Minor WTF, due to the state of the STL in 2008 *Instead of overriding new and delete, I had wrappers. Minor wtf, as I remember having issues overrding new and delete on some compilers back then *Could log debug messages to a C FILE* or C++ fstream. *Defined all my internal structures in the public .h. In fact, i had no private .h *Adds an optional string name to allocations/deallocations, to allow them to be tracked by name. Not smart enough to add __FILE__ and __LINE__ to the mix *wrappers for malloc and free *Very, very, very basic debug logging and function entrance/exit logging. So basic as to be useless. For the life of me I can't understand why anyone would use this code- a day of work would give you something 5x better. Gabe _________________________________________________________________ Get Free (PRODUCT) RED™ Emoticons, Winks and Display Pics. http://joinred.spaces.live.com?ocid=TXT_HMTG_prodredemoticons_052008 -- KPLUG-LPSG@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
