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 *
****************************************************
Press any key to continue . . .
Seriously. There's a PAUSE, and ECHO or two, then another PAUSE. Daily WTF?
Posted to Software development by Simon Brunning at January 28, 2005 11:06 AMOK, OK... I took the PAUSEs out! And removed all occurrences of "dialouge", too...
And this doc is only 53 pages long - a mere tiddler beside the 220-page INI configuration document.
Posted by: Tracey on January 28, 2005 11:11 AMPah. That's coz we had manual checks to make at various points coz we didn't trust vss.
It was known that you just find-and-replaced them out once you were happy that all your paths were right and it's working ok.
Think you need a new memory stick implanted mate :-)
Mark your loosing you touch. Your response to Simon always use to more colourful and heartfelt
Posted by: El Presidente on January 28, 2005 02:07 PM{cough}
Simon you useless git, have you no memory at all? Guess you've forgotten about rem-ing out all the Pauses once you were happy with the paths? I know you had the hang of this in the past coz you whinged like a b1tch about it then too. Guess find-and-replace is a bit beyong you these days?
{a-hem}
That more like it El-P??
It got worse though.
You know that standard problem where you run a batch file by running it via explorer, it goes wrong, and the shell window disappears before you get a chance to read the error message? We've all have that a million times, right? Easy to fix - just open up a *real* shell window, and run the batch file from there, so you can see the error messages.
Except that you had 'EXIT' commands in there, so that the shell window closes no matter how it was opened, and you can't see the error messages anyway...
Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 10, 2005 02:38 PMThat's better. Did you not notice, Simon is perpetually whinging like a bitch, that's why he started a blog.
Now what have you got to say for yourself regarding this "Exit" issue...
Posted by: El Presidente on February 10, 2005 02:49 PMHe'll point out that I should have left the PAUSEs in front of the EXITs alone. ;-)
Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 10, 2005 02:52 PM