Runaround, Down Down
Nov. 17th, 2004 12:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
terryclothI hate build systems, and build tools. Especially unix based ones.
I was asked to do a code review for someone yesterday, but instead of sending me the diff as a text file, he sent it as a bbpack, which I'd never heard of before. Apparently, it's a format to transfer a group of changes so that other people can automatically apply them to their project and check them in instead of you.
That's not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to look at them. The man page showed a -w option to let you do that, but it didn't work -- I got 'command not found', even though the command was right there in /bin. Two *different* /bins had a copy, in fact. Of course, the man page said to use 'outputfile -w' instead of 'bbpack -w', so maybe I had to use that alias for it to work, just like pk(un)zip? Nope, no luck.
So I asked the guy, 'how do you open this?' 'Oh, you set the file executable, and pass the command flags to it.' Of course! How stupid of me! When the man page said to use 'outputfile -w', they meant to substitute the actual name of the output file. They'd just forgotten to mention that, or use a distinctive font to indicate a substitution, or anything.
But that still didn't work -- now I was missing 'windiff'. Since I was running the command on a macintosh, that wasn't entirely unexpected. Asking about that, I was given a link to a mail someone else had sent explaining how to do it -- you had to set an environment variable to some hideously complicated perl script substring that would launch some other program as if it were windiff.
But that didn't work either. 'Oh, right, that doesn't work -- you need to download cwdiff, which'll open codewarrior.' Which didn't work. 'You just have to set the variable to 'cwdiff', not the long perl string with cwdiff substituted in'.
Total number of different attempts to read this file: 7
Also, yesterday, source depot was down -- just like the day before, when it had been down, and brought back up, only to immediately crash. This morning, I got in to see that it was up, but that they'd had to upgrade to a new version, that... wouldn't let me run any commands, giving an authentication error. I had to go through another long series of steps to change my method of authentication, then get the administrator to transfer over my client identity to the 'new username'... and then, a few hours later, they fixed the original problem on the server, so apparently I could have just waited it out. Argh.
I was asked to do a code review for someone yesterday, but instead of sending me the diff as a text file, he sent it as a bbpack, which I'd never heard of before. Apparently, it's a format to transfer a group of changes so that other people can automatically apply them to their project and check them in instead of you.
That's not what I wanted to do. I just wanted to look at them. The man page showed a -w option to let you do that, but it didn't work -- I got 'command not found', even though the command was right there in /bin. Two *different* /bins had a copy, in fact. Of course, the man page said to use 'outputfile -w' instead of 'bbpack -w', so maybe I had to use that alias for it to work, just like pk(un)zip? Nope, no luck.
So I asked the guy, 'how do you open this?' 'Oh, you set the file executable, and pass the command flags to it.' Of course! How stupid of me! When the man page said to use 'outputfile -w', they meant to substitute the actual name of the output file. They'd just forgotten to mention that, or use a distinctive font to indicate a substitution, or anything.
But that still didn't work -- now I was missing 'windiff'. Since I was running the command on a macintosh, that wasn't entirely unexpected. Asking about that, I was given a link to a mail someone else had sent explaining how to do it -- you had to set an environment variable to some hideously complicated perl script substring that would launch some other program as if it were windiff.
But that didn't work either. 'Oh, right, that doesn't work -- you need to download cwdiff, which'll open codewarrior.' Which didn't work. 'You just have to set the variable to 'cwdiff', not the long perl string with cwdiff substituted in'.
Total number of different attempts to read this file: 7
Also, yesterday, source depot was down -- just like the day before, when it had been down, and brought back up, only to immediately crash. This morning, I got in to see that it was up, but that they'd had to upgrade to a new version, that... wouldn't let me run any commands, giving an authentication error. I had to go through another long series of steps to change my method of authentication, then get the administrator to transfer over my client identity to the 'new username'... and then, a few hours later, they fixed the original problem on the server, so apparently I could have just waited it out. Argh.
