Open project - data file obfuscator

Robert Graham Merkel rgmerk@mira.net
Thu, 7 Dec 2000 17:41:43 +1100


Looking for a way to help gnucash, but your scheme and C is a little
rusty?  Want to learn some xml?  Want to help speed up development?
Want to build a tool that could be the building block for a bunch of
other very nifty things?  Well, have I got a project for YOU!

Generally, one of the first steps to fixing a bug is being able to
reliably reproduce it.  Consequently, bug reports are often
accompanied with a data file which can be used to reproduce the bug.
However, gnucash users are understandably reluctant to provide this
information to developers.  I don't like divulging my financial
records either.

One approach to avoid this is something analagous to the C code
"obfuscators" like opqcp and the like.  The idea is simple - replace
names of accounts, payees, and the like with meaningless text.

However, it gets a little bit more complex than that.  You don't want
to simply replace each field text randomly.  You'd want to replace
each text in a consistent way - for instance, each instance of "Bloggs
Inc." should be replaced with "Payee 01" or something similar.
Similarly, sometimes amounts are important to demonstrate the bug,
sometimes they aren't, so you'd probably want to think about providing
the option to randomize amounts.

Now, this program doesn't have to be part of gnucash - it can be (and
probably) should be stand-alone, and doesn't have to be written in
scheme.  In fact, you might consider some of the xml parsing and
generation tools available for Perl.  

If you get this working, you'll not only provide a useful tool in its
own right, you'll have a working environment for people to write code
to parse and output valid gnucash data files in Perl - a capability
that will be *extremely* useful.

So, all those lurkers out there - is there anybody that finds a
project like this interesting??

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Robert Merkel	                           rgmerk@mira.net

"We are excited and optimistic about its usage going 
forward and, yes, we can teach penguins the military 
close-order drill", Mark Norton, US Department of Defense. 
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