Re: [Freedos-user] Makehtml v0.0.1

[Michael B. B. <mbb...@br...>]

On 5/25/2013 1:45 PM, Rugxulo wrote:
> GPL, so patches welcome! :-) 

Patch what?  This code is so tragically flawed and devoid of purpose 
that there is nothing worth patching.  The patch to make it useful and 
get rid of the obvious problems that I pointed out would be bigger than 
the original program, by quite a wide margin too.

>> - The headers that it is putting at the top of the file are fixed in
>> format.  You still have to edit the output to change the string "author"
>> to your name, "content" to something other than "anonymous", "keywords"
>> to something other than <blank>, etc.
> A lot of tools (even digital cameras) do this, mostly because of
> default copyrighting, etc. (Yes, I realize putting "digital camera
> user" or whatever as author isn't very useful for enforcing copyright,
> but still ....)

Repeat after me: There is no point in writing a program that spits out 
fixed strings that are anonymous/generic in nature.  The whole point of 
writing a program is to make it flexible for a wide range of inputs and 
outputs.

>> - It always assumes that you need a link to an image embedded in the
>> output.  The image is always 180 pixels wide and 90 pixels high. There
>> is no error checking to see if that filename was even provided so it
>> generates garbage if that option is missing.
> Yeah, error checking, the bane of a programmer's existence.  :-P
>
> http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

Error checking?  Forget the error checking - just what is the usefulness 
of spitting out a link to an optional image at one point in the file and 
fixing the width and height?  Anybody who knows rudimentary HTML knows 
that if you don't know the image size, let the browser figure it out?  
It's just useless!

>> - It puts a very spammy link to Digitalatoll Webpage Solutions at the
>> bottom of the generated file.
> That is par for the course, many other tools do the same (e.g. GNU
> Enscript). Manual editing of the output is thus required.

This is a link to a commercial business, not an open source site. It has 
no business in the output, period.  Manual editing is required is being 
polite - that kind of garbage does not belong in the program in the 
first place.

>> I'm sorry, but sometimes a free offering isn't worth accepting. This
>> code can probably be replaced with the DOS copy command and a few text
>> files; the copy command also lets you append things to files.
> I wrote my own .pas to .htm converter in .sed recently. Quite buggy.
> :-)    It's a bit trickier than just pasting bits together. Well, my
> big problem was uppercasing reserved keywords within string literals
> (big no no), but I figured it was easy enough to manually fix, if
> needed. Outside of writing my own complete Pascal grammar parser, it's
> not too easy to avoid. (I also ended up weakly patching apashtm to
> work without Lazarus.)
>
>> The spammy link and the inability to customize the output without changing
>> the code and recompiling make it very very limited.
> I think changing the code and manually editing for one's needs is implied here.

You don't need code to do this.  You could just as easily insert a few 
lines at the top of your text file with a text editor, or use the copy 
command.  This program does nothing that can't be done with the copy 
command and concatenating snippets of files.
>> DOS users don't need this, and I doubt that Linux users need it either.
> In fairness, nobody needs computers at all, society lived without them
> for thousands of years. And this IS only v0.0.1, keep in mind.   ;-)
>
> P.S. I don't know the history of the Internet nor all programs ever
> made. I'm not sure if GNU A2PS is an official or unofficial precursor
> to GNU Enscript. There does seem to be some partial common heritage
> there. In any case, A2PS has a script called "card" which will "print"
> a reference card of a program based upon its "inline help". Just for
> reference, that exists as well. Oh, and I guess help2man (written in
> Perl) is vaguely similar. Yeah, lots and lots of doc formats out
> there.

What does this have to do with anything?