I've had to make some changes to a very old project of ours. Very old. I've not worked on it since rebuilding my PC, so I've had to rebuild the project's environment from scratch.

Well, I can certainly see that we've learnt a great deal since then. The first problem is that the structure in VSS has nearly no resemblance to the structure in disk. Setting up all the working folders correctly is a nightmare. (OK, using VSS is the first problem :-)

We didn't know about Ant back then, so everything is built using nightmarishly huge batch files. Batch files aren't too flexible, so we have multiple versions of all of these batch files, which we have to build using template versions and a cool little find-and-replace script that I put together in Python. (God, that's nasty, too. I've learnt a lot of Python as well!)

The whole process is insanely complicated. (And I do mean complicated, not complex.) Thank God Tracey was in charge of documenting it. No one has ever accused Tracey of leaving anything out of a document. ;-)

All this is irritating. But the worst thing, by far the worst thing, is that bloody Mark left fistfuls of PAUSE statements all over the place. If I see "Hit any key to continue..." one more bloody time...

Update: It's finished, finally:

Press any key to continue . . .
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* FINISHED EVO Development/EVO_Base GET ALL *
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Press any key to continue . . .

Seriously. There's a PAUSE, and ECHO or two, then another PAUSE. Daily WTF?