I've added support for HTTP Basic Authentication to xmlrpc-c. This required refactoring the client library to use server objects (instead of just URLs). This enhancement turned into a nightmare debugging job, because the following software sucks more than strictly necessary:
- PHP: Every time I write a non-trivial PHP
program, I spend 15 minutes wondering why some variable is
unset when it should contain data. Then I realize that I've
left out a global declaration, and PHP has silently
created an empty local variable shadowing some global.
- w3c-libwww: Libwww has this weird, asynchronous callback
model, and the API isn't especially well documented. Once
you define a callback, libwww feels entitled to call it at
the strangest of times--during some failed network
operations (but not others), during library shutdown, and
whenever you look at it cross-eyed. And sometimes libwww
will pass you a "200 OK" when it hasn't even made a network
connection, and your chunk pointer will mysteriously be
NULL. So my code is now laced with incredibly paranoid
assertions, and basically trusts nothing returned by
the library.
And let's not even ask which festering ball of bugs was truncating five bytes off the bottom of every XML document. But at least everything now works, and passes my evil test suites once again.
Jade: While I'm ranting about broken tools, I should mention Jade (and JadeTex, and TeX, and all the other hairy DocBook tools). This stuff is impossible to set up. It's badly broken in RedHat 6.2. It requires you to edit TeX *.ini files.
If you're not careful, you'll start mumbling the following nonsense in your sleep:
pdftex -ini -progname=pdfjadetex pdflatex.ini
pdftex -ini -progname=pdfjadetex \&pdflatex pdfjadetex.ini
# restore the original pdflatex.fmt file:
pdftex -ini -progname=pdflatex pdflatex.ini
(Thanks to Adam Di Carlo for figuring this out.)
It's just unbelievable how bad this stuff is. TeX allocates everything in fixed size buffers, and hard-codes the buffer sizes into all of its format files. Jade spews out ASCII NULLs, causing JadeTex to cough up a lung. TeX fmtutil wants to have a little talk with you, and find out where JadeTeX hid all the *.sty files. And of course, let's not forget the joy inherent in editing SGML CATALOG files to work around RedHat typos.
But the resulting manuals are fairly pretty... :-)