[cumbria_lug] Perl or Python: a challenge

[Angie Ahl]

OK I'm running from the room screaming. Good luck, seriously. That  
sounds hellish.

Angie

> It's not the language that's the problem, It's the way this code  
> has occurred. Back in the mid nineties or thereabouts a utility was  
> written to pass e-mails from one system to another with a little  
> checking and reformatting, then a second system decided it could  
> use it, it was still internal to DEFRA with two customers. So then  
> a farmer asked if he could use it to send data in and for some  
> reason it was made publicly available to a few select big  
> agricultural businesses, as a trial. Now it processes about sixty  
> million records a year from thousands of sources, Farmers, Cattle  
> markets, slaughterhouses, vets, trading standards, government labs,  
> BCMS. At each stage someone has added or altered the code to work,  
> added an extra program in and the like. So now we have a monster,  
> it works, but we don't know why it does some things. Now we will  
> need to migrate it to a new platform since the box it's been  
> running on is falling apart and over twenty years old, as is the OS  
> and mail program.
>
> Today a farmer buying an off-the-shelf farm management package will  
> get a form to complete to register himself to the system and we  
> return a unique i.d. which he pops into the software and starts  
> using. We would prefer to kill this system and migrate to a wep-app  
> but with so many users actually using it it's not going to be easy
>
> Trevor.
>
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