Re: Intent to package: vcg

[Henning Makholm <henning@makholm.net>]

Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:

> alternatively, the uglified files are GPL-ed, so it is permissable to
> de-uglify them :-)

> depending on how hairy they are, it might be no more than a few hours
> work with gnu indent and vi (s/vi/your preferred text editor/)

It's not as bad as it could be (one is going to need perl too, I
think), but

1] one would end up with code without comments (perhaps not very
   serious; some people code mostly without comments themselves
   which does not in itself make their source less free).

2] it seems that some amount of macro expansion has already been
   done on the uglified sources.

3] all identifiers with file scope have been renamed to foobar187
   or something like that. Would take some amount of reverse
   engineering to make readable.

4] worst: one would be at a loss when a new upstream version appeared
   which used other uglifying gimmicks. Effectively, de-uglifying
   would amount to a project fork, so the maintainer would need to
   be really determined to continue the maintenance without any
   upstream support.

-- 
Henning Makholm
http://www.diku.dk/students/makholm