Feedback

laterite is in beta — a statement about how much real-world use it has had, not about how much testing it has had. The only way to change the first one is for people to run it against files we have never seen.

So: give it a try. Point it at a delivery you already have and see what happens.

What we'd most like to hear

Was it fast? Speed is the headline claim, and the honest test is your files on your machine, not our benchmarks on ours. If it wasn't fast, that's the more useful report of the two.

What did it flag that python-ags4 didn't — or miss that python-ags4 caught? This is the sharpest thing you can send us. laterite's validator is a clean-room implementation of the numbered rules, so where the two disagree, one of three things is true: it's a deliberate divergence, it's a bug in laterite, or it's something worth taking to the AGS Data Format Working Group. We can only tell which if we hear about it.

Check the known divergences first — the deliberate ones are catalogued there, and a match saves us both a round trip.

What did you want it to do that it wouldn't? Beta is also when the shape of the API is still cheap to change.

We don't want your data

Real AGS4 deliveries are commercially sensitive, and we would rather you never sent one. You do not need to attach a file to file a useful report.

Describe the shape instead:

• the group and heading involved,
• the AGS data type,
• what the offending value looks like — its form, not its content ("2 decimal places where the heading says 3DP", not the reading itself),
• the rule code, if the validator gave you one.

That is enough for us to build a synthetic fixture that reproduces the problem, and that fixture becomes a permanent regression test. If you genuinely can't describe something without sending the file, say so — we'd rather know that than lose the report.

Where to send it

Not sure whether it's a bug? → Discussions. AGS4 is a format with real ambiguity in it, and "is this laterite, or is it my file?" is a good question, not a nuisance one. Start there and we'll work it out; if it turns out to be a bug, we'll open the issue ourselves.

Sure it's a bug, or know what you want? → Issues. There's a template, and its first question is which surface you're on — the Python wheel, the Node package, wasm, the DuckDB extension, the lat CLI or an engine crate.

What to expect back

We aim to read everything weekly. That's a goal rather than a promise — laterite has one maintainer — and it's a promise of a reply, not of a fix. A report that becomes a synthetic fixture and a test has done its job even if the behaviour doesn't change for a while.