Re: [Nms-cgi-devel] Proposed programs' header skeleton

[Olivier D. <dr...@sh...>]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 08:51:14PM -0500, Joseph F. Ryan wrote:
> Eww... this is very ugly, and very similar to the way Matt Wright did 
> it.  Flower boxes are reminiscent of BASIC; I don't know of anyone who 
> still uses them in production code, especially perl code.  I think the way 
> we have the configuration section delimited now is fine.

I'm confused... Do we want those scripts to be as much as humainly
possible like Matt Wright's or not?

As for flower boxes, they make things clear. And as many newbies will
tell you they like things when it's clear. I may be wrong, but I seem to
recall this project to be for non-technical people who know very little
about programming, and probably even less about Perl. I'm new to this
project so please, let me know if my stream of thought is going in the
wrong direction.

Also, another reason why I don't like the way it is now is because of
the very long long long long long log at the beginning of each programs.
I think logs belongs in a seperate file, but again, that's just my
opinion. If nobody else agrees (like in the case of constants) then
we'll leave it this way.

> The necessary information is in the README.  In fact, I think its 
> harmful to put the descriptions of the config in the script itself, as a 
> lazy user may attempt to decipher the variables just from the description 
> and never look at the README for more complete explanations.

I agree with that. I put short brief comments by the config parameters
but I think having the warning at the top is enough to direct users who
don't understand to the README file.

-Oli

-- 
+----------------------------------------------+
| Olivier Dragon        dr...@sh... |
| Software Engineering II, McMaster University |
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