You Get What You Pay For

Maybe I'm just a bit naive and maybe a bit lucky. But so far almost every tool that I've downloaded and tried from the Internet has been pretty reliable. I mean as long as it comes from a reputable site or recommended by someone who seems trustworthy or knowledgeable, they just seem to work.

So anyway, I just tried this Ant code to create a task for Doxygen. (I didn't make the call to use Doxygen, but it's pretty good, if you really care a lot about documentation). But back to the Doxygen task for Ant. I got the link from the Ant web site in the External Tools and Tasks section. So you would assume all the tools and tasks are tested and they all work (and yes, I read the disclaimer at the top, but still). I tried the Doxygen task and for some reason it just didn't work. I spent the majority of a day trying to figure it out. What it eventually turned out to be was a configuration property that was being defaulted into the config file from the Doxygen task Java code. Who would have thought that a bug that would make it not run would be in distribution binaries? For the longest time I thought it was some sort of setup issue on my end. Anyway, I also ended up fixing another error in the code that someone else found and had posted in the bugs section and put in a few custom things that I thought might be a good idea. I also posted my bug find and solution into the bug list as well.

Don't get me wrong, I really appreciate the code that Karthik A Kumar wrote. It was really well done and gets the job done in a very cool way. The Doxygen Task really helped me out a lot and saved me a lot of time. I also learned a lot about Ant Tasks and Doxygen along the way. I think it was time well spent.

But just remember, things aren't always perfect...especially when they are free.