bogus bogotuning

[Greg Louis]

On 20040128 (Wed) at 1600:28 -0500, Jason A. Smith wrote:

> Why not let them experiment a little with bogotune and with different
> corpus files of various sizes?

Nobody forbids them to change the code and do that -- for themselves,
on their own responsibility.

> What if they already have 1800 spam email saved and don't want to
> wait a few more weeks for more, or fiddle with the sources?

They could write politely to me and offer to pay for a special version
;)  -- no, just kidding.

> > If you believe that bogotune could use improvement, by all means improve it and if
> > you think that your changes might be useful to others, feel free to contribute
> > them to the project.
> 
> There is no point in submitting a patch if it will be rejected, right?

David did mention this morning that he agrees with my view that such an
option is undesirable, so that's probably the situation.

I really find this thread a bit comical, you know.  I wrote bogotune
(in R), and in the process I determined that -- for my own convenience
-- I should have the program stop if there weren't enough messages to
give me reliable results.  Then David and I took it public, since it
seemed a useful tool, converting it first to perl and then (David did
the hard work this time) to C.  At one point there was actually an
option to do just what you wanted, but we took it out again because it
wasn't found helpful.  Now you come along and ask for it, we try
(persistently) to explain why it's a bad idea, and because we disagree
with you (on the basis of experience and as developers of the code in
question), we're called arrogant, closed-minded, stubborn and what not.
I'm not really interested in "discussion" on that level, but if you do
change the code yourself, and you do present a plausible example of
a useful run with small numbers, I'll not refuse to consider changing
my position.

-- 
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