license

[Scott David Daniels]

Arthur wrote:
> Expressing the wish, out loud, that someone else who is taking advantage of
> the community's productivity might act a bit more reasonably and less
> selfishly as a community member is seen by (at least some) of the community
> as an assault on the community.  That wish and hope is an assault?
Even presuming your analysis is correct:
Asking such a person to change politely is, of course, in order.
Given that such change is not forthcoming, you _might_ be in the
presence of a vandal.  Standing up and calling someone a vandal
will not cause him to change, whether he is one or not.

The result will only make loud stuff happen and the newsgroup
become less civil, while failing to accomplish your desired result.

> Of course, the other solution is to overwrite his help file with my help
> file.  That would indeed be 4 keystrokes.  And than I could be the guy
> sitting on ten thousand lines of code, driving my toy.
Seems the thing to do is this:
Let's call the mystery application "V".
     (1) if either original.html or V.html exist in Doc, fail.
     (2) copy "index.html" file to "original.html".
     (3) install "application V"
     (4) rename "index.html" to be "V.html"
     (5) rename "original.html" to be "index.html"
<for extra credit>
     (6) rename "modindex.html" to be "original.html"
     (7) dest = open("modindex.html", "w")
         source = open("original.html")
         for line in source:
             print >>dest, line
             if line.startswith(
                   '<dt><a href="mac/module-videoreader.html">'):
               # or some line you deem more appropriate.
               print >>dest, ('<dt><a href="V.html">'
                   '<tt class="module">Vname</tt></a>')
         dest.close()
         source.close()

Walk softly and write clear code,
-Scott David Daniels
Scott.Daniels at Acm.Org