Hi All,

I have sort of problem or dilemma.

This is my first Perl developing contract. I have been in this company for approx less than 4.5 months. Initially it was a 3 month contract, and then at the end of the 3rd month, it was extended to another month. Off course I wasn’t happy with this arrangement, but there wasn’t anything I can do about it.

My boss has asked me to give him the source code to an application that I have developed – that the full cycle, from the concept, design, coding, testing, documentation and deployment. The problem is he has also have asked me to comment every single line the code. He explained that he needs to know what every single line does, by the way he is not a developer nor had development background.

Before I began to work for them, they had lots of accounts access permission problems. Their inapt and useless helpdesk supervisor has assigned the ‘Everyone’ account full access to literary every where (server/drive/share/everything) in the organisation. So, to tackle this problem, they employed a project manger, who in turn has employed a number of assistance and helpers. A year and half down later, nothing was done. The reason was because Microsoft’s Cacls can’t do the job, therefore they require a Perl programmer.

Enter yours truly, as a resource to develop a tool for the 3rd line support guys to use intsead of M$’s silly Calcs command. This was done, with a great help from PM, within the first month.
Next, they came back and said they would like a GUI interface for the application because it going to be used by the help desk staff so in my boss’s own words “The package must be idiot proof”. So there I went, and programmed a Perl /TK based GUI interface. They came back again and said “right we would like all the information to be piped into a database”. No worries I said, and in come the ODBC library, and programmed it so they can dump the data into a database.
This wasn’t enough, they cam back with a demand (can’t say it was a request), to put all the scripts that I have written into one application. My idea was very original and have went out of my way to ensure that the application is of top quality , almost idiot proof, very user friendly…etc. and they liked this application/script a lot.
More requests came in to add more facilities and functions to the script, in other words ”they kept moving the goal post”, the goal post are so far apart I can’t see any of the posts anymore.

Now, the contract is coming to an end. OH yes by the way, because they have never ever seen Perl or what it can do before, nor they ever had any 3rd line support staff with any sort of a scripting experience, they were absolutely mesmerise (I think) with my scripts. Unfortunately, this did not do me any favours with the current 3rd line support engineers and progressively I became very unpopular with them. It seemed that the more I wrote better scripts to automate support task, the more hostile they turned?

My question is; having given them the exe version of my script and full user manual for it, can they request/demand that I should comment every single line, because, well it is obvious, that they can simply bring someone else, give them my script with every line is commented so they can do what ever to it, own it, reap the benefis…etc. can they do that?

Nothing my contract explicitly says that I should comment every single line of my code before I leave so they can bring any Jerko to take over the script? Can they?

Many Thanks for listening.

In reply to Perl contract problems by blackadder

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