Here's a philosophical question for you to chew on today. I need an OSC library for ruby. OSC is OpenSoundControl[1] and it's basically a nifty little lightweight transport-independent protocol. The spec[2] is also lightweight and a decent programmer could implement it in a few hours time. But laziness trumps even a few hours so I looked for an existing lib and found one[3].
The existing lib is good. It has the basic functionality. But I had a different usage pattern in mind than what the author provides. To get it to behave the way I want it to, I would have to basically refactor much of the 375-line codebase. So here's the two-part dilemna. First, his design will be harder to wrangle for my needs than a fresh design would be. So I'm faced with the technical decision to rewrite and cannibalize, or refactor. Second, I'd like to not fork but let this be a natural evolution of the code, but how do you tactfully send a guy a total refactoring of his code? Especially when his English and my Japanese aren't so good. OTOH how do you tactfully fork? I look forward to hearing everyone's thoughts on this. 1. http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/ 2. http://www.cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/OSC-spec.html 3. http://www.funaba.org/en/ruby.html#osc -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
