Fixing someone else's code

All started with another round of "I'll organize myself!". This time get my books in order. Maybe music and movies as well, but books first. So been looking around the interwebs and the Ubuntu Software Center [sic], to find some suitable candidate for the job.

Alexandria popped up and seemed to have great reviews. It only does books, but seem to do it the way it should be, they said. Giving it a test-ride myself - man it was painful. The very first thing: it should be able to add books from Amazon (and other collections too, but those are tiny compared to that). Well, it doesn't. Just throws big hissfits when trying and that's all...

Now, instead of going and trying out a different program, what did I do? Grab git-svn, and check out the code. It's all ruby in the end... Poking around for about an hour, it turns out, that the library Alexandria uses processing Amazon's XML-formatted answer (Hpricot) just do some very very stupid things. It completely borks even simple XML structures. Not sure how this got through any testing, but probably it got through because there's no testing... And the problem is there for months, and even if there's a new version of Hpricot on Ubuntu, it's available for the next version (10.04 Lucid Lynx) but not the current one (9.10 Karmic Koala). Even Debian (Ubuntu's "daddy") has the new version...

So, there were three options that I could do:

1. Just wait until someone comes up with a solution
2. Repackage Hpricot for Ubuntu Karmic
3. Change the code for something else than Hpricot

Comments on these in turn:

1. Sure, but then where's the fun?
2. Could do, but I'm pretty annoyed with the Ubuntu packaging system now, because I don't know it well enough to do even simple things. Tried, but failed. It's for another post, but it's a but too versatile and complicated for me at the moment. Keep trying some time, though....
3. So this is what we gonna do, especially because there's another library, called Nokogiri. Seems to be pretty similar, except it was working.

Getting down to business, there was still some problem... Don't know much about XML (except what it is and more or less how it looks like, but much less about terminology and such, which kinda breaks "googleablility"). Also, Nokogiri didn't seem to have much of a documentation. The wiki on their github page was giving helpful suggestion to look around StackOverflow for nokogiri tagged questions. Not ideal....

Anyway after a few hours, it was working just fine, I could add books, I could add books with multiple authors, it had the pictures and all the goodies... Not a good-looking fix since there's still a lot of code there which I don't understand the purpose - since I never seen it ever properly work before... But it was a start. Happy, commit the changes, clean it up later.

Then I checked the original bug-report again, and someone just made Option 2 into reality, thus making all my efforts pretty much obsolete. Tried, and works...

Now, lessons from the story, and this fine weekend:

• XML seems to be fun - once understood, and a lot of possibilities to interact with websites if one can use it well. (you know XML and JSON and can handle most sites)
• Ruby seems to be fine but it's not different enough and too different from Python in the same time, that I don't yet see the point of trying even deeper. No offence, though.
• While so far I found Python-related projects have very extensive documentation, these to days I'm yet to find any comparably well documented Ruby project. It might just me, but the culture seems to be just a tad different.
• If I ever have some time, might do some benchmarking and if Nokogiri is really faster than Hpricot, might rewrite that code a bit better and see what those guys say.
• Even when this one bug was fixed, run into so many others. Not showstopper, but bad enough not to recommend using Alexandria just now. Maybe if the development picks up a little more...
• It's interesting to check out other people's code and even to be annoyed by it. That actually shows where I should improve as well. There's plenty of that....
• ... and lastly: maybe I should re-check my priorities, and spend my next weekend in a bit more useful. :P