I was recently looking at the volunteer page at the Tor Project, and they have a piece of Perl, soat.pl, that needs a revamp. What it does is go to various web pages both via the open Internet and via a proxy to make sure that the proxy is not altering the pages on the way through.

There are things you could improve without changing the functionality. These include simple things like open without the requisite or die after it. It spawns a shell to md5sum instead of using Digest::MD5, wget instead of LWP::UserAgent, etc.

Functionally it could be improved by using HTML::Parser to look over the web pages and focus on parts that aren't expected to change (i.e., because of normal dynamic content or GeoIP differentiation). It could do with a config file or the judicious application of Getopt::Long (and the corresponding Pod::Usage).

This looks like low hanging fruit to me, but I might not be able to get the time to put into it. It would be a win for Perl evangelism because it might counter the idea that Perl "sucks at life", as the volunteer page suggests.

In reply to Re: Perl Project? by kyle
in thread Perl Project? by why_bird

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