__/ [Roy Culley] on Wednesday 08 February 2006 19:09 \__
> begin risky.vbs
> <dsc7ht$1lvt$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Roy Schestowitz <newsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> __/ [Roy Culley] on Wednesday 08 February 2006 01:19 \__
>>
>>> When I got fed up with turqstat (some article headers would crash
>>> it, it uses very 'fuzzy' logic when working with article dates and
>>> the code is horrible. When I wanted to reduce the width of the
>>> reports it uses hard coded numbers for each section of the report)
>>> I decided one Saturday afternoon if I could write a perl script to
>>> do the same.
>>
>> Why is it not public [polite tone]? Is it difficult for the user to
>> maintain unless changes are made in-line? Is the Perl notoriously
>> intractable?
>
> I can only describe it as damn ugly. As I said I just knocked it up
> to see if it was easy to do. Since then I've just hacked it more as
> I've added new features. I keep saying to myself I should rewrite it
> but am just too lazy these days. :-)
>
> [snip]
>
>>> Since then of course I've added new features which slow it down a
>>> bit. It takes 2 or 3 seconds to process a weeks COLA articles. I
>>> can live with that. :-)
>>
>> What?!?! That's quick indeed, compared with turqstat that fetches
>> the feed almost immediately on this 100Mbit connection and then
>> labours for about 1 minute per 1,000 posts (it doesn't scale
>> linearly, I know).
>
> I cheat. I copy the last weeks articles to a directory under /tmp
> which is mounted using tmpfs. So my script doesn't need to check the
> article dates and after the copy most if not all are probably cached.
>
>>> I run leafnode and have 2 newsfeeds. Very few articles are missed
>>> other than those filtered by leafnode such as mail to news gateways.
>>
>> That's probably a positive thing.
>
> It most certainly is. :-)
>
>> My question regarding publicising the script has been asked before I
>> read your message carefully enough. Let's share the goods, not doing
>> the equivalent of monopolisation or patent. Self-glorification is an
>> act of attempting to dominate by keeping others in the dark while
>> your desire to GPL it shows that you want to _contribute_, which is
>> anything _but_ selfish.
>
> I will be happy to make my script available to all under the GPL if
> you can motivate me to rewrite so that I won't be ashamed of it. :-)
Just put it up on Freshmeat.net as-is. Many hackers are using scripts they
download without even looking at them. In fact, one script that I use to
justify and hyphenate text in newsgroups (TeX derivative) is from
freshmeat.net. I wrapped it up under another script to make its use sim-
pler and quicker. Since it contains the most fundamental documentation
(--help), all was fine.
The prospective user of so-called advanced tools (newsgroups stats fall
under this category) will no care what happens under the hood provided the
tool works and its operation does not require diving into the code.
If part of your manual would included "change if user='billwg' then
cat(user,' (troll)')", perhaps it's worth stripping out, in interests of
simplicity and robustness. Using turqstat as a reference, its documenta-
tion is terrible, lacking and there was a documentation bug I had to tell
the author about.
http://schestowitz.com/Weblog/archives/2006/02/06/newsgroups-stats/
I almost gave up on that tool because of that bug. I'm glad I carried on
experimenting.
Best wishes,
Roy
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