Re: [s-d] proposal parser

[Daniel Lepage <dpl33@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jan 22, 2007, at 1:02 PM, Antonio Dolcetta wrote:
> I've written a very basic (read: horrible) proposal parser.
> you start proposals by writing BEGINPROPOSAL and end them with
> ENDPROPOSAL, each proposal must have a title, enclosed between
> STARTTITLE ENDTITLE

What if I want to use the word "ENDPROPOSAL" in the course of my  
proposal?

> i was wondering if it's really needed to password protect stuff, I  
> could
> just read the sender mail address and match that with the latest
> proposal with the same title.
> if that was from a different address the new one gets discarded.
> Yes, i know It's easy to forge mail headers, but we can already do  
> that,
> no ?

What if somebody has two email addresses? Also, nothing currently  
prohibits two props with the same title; it sounds like this script  
would foul up in that case.

> I was also thinking, instead of having people send proposals to a
> special address we could simply subscribe the bot to the mailing list
> and have it work automatically, that would be nice.

It would be nice as long as there were some clear indication when  
something goes wrong. For example, if I start a message with  
STARTPROOSAL, everyone will get the message and see that I made a  
proposal, but it wouldn't show up on the page because the script  
wouldn't recognize it.

Also, having people send to a special address has the advantage that  
id numbers can be assigned immediately and will show up in the  
resulting message. Right now, we see the proposal when the author  
sends it, and then we learn its ID number when the admin assigns one.  
With the script, the number is assigned immediately, but we can't see  
it unless the script sends another message announcing the number.

A third problem is robustness in the face of unexpected messages -  
what if I reply to somebody's prop message but forget to remove their  
proposal in the reply text? Will the system register that as a new  
proposal, made by me and with lots of >s in the text?

-- 
Wonko

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