I wrote some code in the mean time. I also wait for the next fatal bug report for ftpcopy, but nobody seems to have found it by now. Oh well.
The new code is a caching library with some command line tools around it. Nothing complicated, just a kind of "put this into the cache and if there's not enough space then throw away the oldest entries", but it took me some days to get the bugs out. I'm quite confident that it's stable by now.
Now i want to package it up and release it to the world,
hoping
that somebody else will not have to reinvent the wheel. But
coding for me is one thing, coding for others is completely
different. I mean, it hurts to say "you are an idiot
and this
code doesn't work reliably" to yourself - but it hurts
even more
if someone else tells this truth to you.
So i better make sure ... what? That's there the problem
starts.
- Documentation. There be a manual page? Sorry, have to
write
this myself. But i hate writing documentation.
This time i'm going to not use POD but tmac.an, and try to get something readable from groff -Thtml. - Code quality. There's a big difference between "works for me" and "works or does something reasonable in every situation". "works for me" usually means "breaks on machines with different endian or alignment requirements". Think of possible overflows everywhere. What about strange input values or a corrupted cache? I've to re-read the whole stuff. It's _so_ boring.
- What hidden limitations do the functions have? Remove or document them (the problem is the "hidden" part).
- Simplicity: make sure that the code is so simple that at
least
i don't have problems to understand it in 17 months from
now.
This possibly means to rewrite the function to enter
something
into the cache. Not funny.
- Library API: make sure the API is consistent. I tend to not even notice "f(char *buf, bufsize)" against "g(bufsize, buf)". Make sure the functions, constants, ... have reasonable names.
- Command line API: make sure the tools options and arguments are consistent.
- Locking: Did i _really_ correctly document the locking requirements? I don't think i'll get it right the first time ...
And it's summer now. For that kind of stuff winter has been invented, i think.