Hello, All; I've been playing with barcodes, for work, and using the excellant GD::Barcode modules. I've found several things that need to be changed, and am wondering two things.
1. What's the common / accepted method for modifying module functionality on your own system? As a temporary hack, I just overloaded the method I wanted to change (GD::Barcode::plot) in the script file that called it. Is it acceptable to actually edit the modules source code? Do people write their own derived classes? How is this usually dealt with? 2. What is an acceptable way to communicate these changes back to the module's author? Can I just send him an email? Is there a bugzilla like tool I should use? Is there some automated system via CPAN I need to know about? Thanks, in advance, for your guidance on this issue! -- Stephen A. Jarjoura http://runester.com/ [PS. In case anyone was curious, here are the three things I needed to change. 1. In GD::Barcode, the bars are drawn with the GD primitive "line" and always have the minimum resolution. The barcode standard itself recognizes that for some 'high noise' environments it makes the barcode easier to read if the line widths are increased - as long as their respective ratio is maintained. Therefore I needed to add a 'res' parameter and change the primitive from 'line' to 'filledRectangle'. 2. In GD::Barcode::Code39, the module does NOT correctly prepend/postpend the required 'start character' and 'stop character' (which just turn out to be asterisks '*'). 3. In GD::Barcode, the ascii text displayed below the code is the same as that which is encoded above. In practice, the human readable portion often contains spaces and hyphens to aid readablity but which are NOT encoded in the bars. ] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
