Open project - data file obfuscator

[Mike Sabin]

I fall into the category of "wanting-to-help-but-lousy-at-C-and-scheme".
Your idea is a good one.  Python is about the only language i'm
worth anything in. I will consider it for a few weeks.  December
is looking pretty hopeless, workload-wise.

Mike Sabin
 
On Thu, Dec 07, 2000 at 05:41:43PM +1100, Robert Graham Merkel wrote:
> 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??
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 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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