Trials, Errors and Poor Docs…
If you didn’t know I am a software developer, and I work for a small company. What this means is that I am the one that has to figure shit out.
We have some third party software that we need to distribute with our software, and our users are not typically all that sophisticated, so we have to make it as easy for them as possible. To make things easy for them I put a little “wrapper” around the third party installation program that force feeds the correct options to the installer. Most of the time this works pretty good as long as the end user doesn’t have something on their computer that conflicts the stuff we are installing. The funny thing…the only stuff that conflicts with this software is other shit from the same vendor.
Anyway…the vendor released a new version this week, so yesterday I set out to start updating my wrapper. Seems like it should be straight forward enough…
The app comes as a single file, when you run the file it creates a temporary directory and extracts (copies) a bunch of files into the temp directory then it runs one of those files. Wow too much techno babble… OK so anyway blah blah and feed in the options blah blah and it does this and that blah blah. When I do this manually straight from windows it works exactly as I expect it to…copy the same shit into my wrapper, compile, run…going going going….BOOM it blows up. Oh and this is after hours of digging through the web finding how to set the options I needed to set.
So back to the net…deadend…not that…how about this…FUCK this is frustrating!!! Oh look a manual only 116MB download…click…wait…download stalls…cancel…click…wait…wait…done. Alright…here we go! Search for install…OK…DAMN IT!!! Nothing that helps!
Oh…I forgot to mention that the new app also requires some other shit to be installed before it can be installed, and I did manage to get the wrapper to install that one yesterday. This included checking to make sure that it hadn’t already been installed.
So pretty much I spent my whole day spinning my wheels…or something.
Oh yeah and I just want to give a little shout out to my number one fan!!! googlebot…I love you man.
