What's a data drier?

[pointyointment]

I would like to suggest that the readme should briefly explain what a "data drier" is. I have no idea, and got no relevant results from Google for that term (or "data dryer").

[naxxfish]

It's this: https://github.com/southlondonmakerspace/membership-dryer (which you probably can't see).

tl;dr: this quote mostly sums it up

This software is to give a "dry" environment for testing the South London Makerspace membership database, which is a Node JS web-based system which integrates with Discourse, a discussion web system.

We have a pair of exporting programs (exportmembership and exportdiscourse) which export data on the live system, suitable for backups. However, this data is considered confidential as it contains for example names, home addresses, and phone numbers.

We therefore have a "dryer" or "anonymiser" which takes those datasets and produces isomorphic data which is identical in structure but without personal information. There are two programs (drymembership and drydiscourse) which dry the two datasets. Drying the discourse data requires access to the raw membership data, in order to get matching information.