Re: Bite off a little at a time...

[idnopheq]

Well, all, I guess the core problem is that I cannot decypher it enough to support it, which I have been tasked with. By some miracle, the process has run for over a year w/o restarting, so there is magic within it, no doubt. But what is that story from the Jargon file, about Mel, a real programmer?

I see areas where things like Net::Telnet maybe employed versus opening raw sockets, where Tie::Hash would make life easier, even where removing seemingly obvious redundencies and lengthy if-elsif statements, would improve things. But, being so sensitive to day-to-day operatios, is there a delicate way to proceed?

Like I said, cperl-mode will help me with lining things up, and hopefully tcpdump will tell me what is passing between the various hosts. I would most definitely rewrite the thing, but w/o a model office to play in, what can I do other than tweek and test?

Remember I'm working IT for the auto industry, in a group of four which used to be twenty.

HTH
--
idnopheq
Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

~ Shunryu Suzuki

[dragonchild]

A little at a time, my friend. You have to go slowly.

The very first thing is that you should ALWAYS have some manner of development box which (relatively) closely mirrors the production environment. What're you going to do, develop in production?!? Of course not!

Get it lined up. That will help you understand what's going on. Comment it extensively. Then, start breaking out functions. Rename variables. Take it very slowly.

You really can't do very much, unfortunately, without that development area. Demand that, or say that what the manager requested cannot be safely done.

------
/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!

Vote paco for President!

[idnopheq]

Slowly is what I'm all about, hense the post. But I'm in no position to demand anything, as my company Friday laid off 3% of the workforce.

Given that I'm stuck in a less than optimal situation, I'm trying to at least clean up the syntax to a legible point w/o breaking functionallity. I admit, tho, that $foo and @Foo look too similar and make my eyes bleed.

I'm taking someone's advice and writing a script that will simply output all of my scalars, arrays, and hashes so I can see what I'm up against.

Also, I'm deficient when it comes to the debugger ... but necessity is the mother of invention and/or education ...

HTH
--
idnopheq
Apply yourself to new problems without preparation, develop confidence in your ability to to meet situations as they arrise.

~ Shunryu Suzuki