Well, billable hours are a good thing, but you have to ask yourself if you want to be trying to `polish a turd' for the next 6 months, or if it will be less painful and less smelly to just squeeze some of your own out?

I suppose the trick is to make sure that the heavy refactoring that is needed won't impact on the customer. Either way they're going to have to pay for it to be re-written, if it's not all at once (as in re-doing it) it'll be re-re-rewritten as you take out the quotes in favour of heredocs, then the next guy replaces those with Templates, and the guy after him as to refactor something on another spot, to allow a new function to be added.

I've been patching an unspeakable system for the past 9 months, and you know what? it's not far from where it was when I started, because of all the little odd off-by-one cases, and the wierd if-this-if-this-if-this conditions thrown about in it.

If you want a well defined behavour and a nice set of clean interfaces, get a good unix programer (i'm sure you are a fine example of this, Firefly258, garrison et al) in and start again.

Even if you refactor everything, to be perfectly readable and clear. you'll still be stuck with the initial design (if you believe they designed it) -- and how good can a design by these people be?

slash rant.

Not that I'm bitter about that