• (cs)

    The company I work for depends on a small program written in the early 1990s. It was written to handle a single stream of data.

    Over the years it expanded, with many variants of the same core program tucked away on the network.
    Now, the application was somewhat thoughtfully designed.
    As it starts it draws configuration information from a database file.
    But instead of one central file, keyed by version ID, each deployment has it's local copy of that file.

    Keep in mind that there are ten year's worth of this program scattered across the network.
    Some are doing important work.
    Some are doing nothing.
    But we can't just kill 'em off, because there's no good way to tell which ones matter and which ones don't.

    We upgraded a third-party library.
    Unfortunately, naming conventions and such prevented us from reusing the existing path.
    A solution was at hand, as this had been foreseen oh so many years ago.

    Just update the configuration field for the path - in every copy of that file.

    Oh, my aching head.

  • Brent (unregistered)

    I realize this is a long dead thread, and likely no one will ever read this, but I just have to say: You gave them code? I'd have said screw these nimrods...

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Brent

    I read it. :)

  • (cs) in reply to James
    James:
    *I* read it. :)
    Yeah it wasn't a completely lost time Brent
  • (cs)

    I read it too. And yes, he gave them code. But he didn't say the code was VB. He probably gave them C++, which they couldn't read!

  • neminem (unregistered) in reply to Pim
    Pim:
    I read it too.
    As did I! It's always fun commenting on entries in the very first page of someone's famous blog, before every post got hundreds of comments in minutes.

    I still think you should've tried to sell it to them for 10k. I mean, heck, that's over 50% off!

  • Kempeth (unregistered) in reply to Brent
    Brent:
    I realize this is a long dead thread, and likely no one will ever read this, but I just have to say: You *gave* them code? I'd have said screw these nimrods...
    I think it's a reasonable compromise. He supplied the printing code and they integrated it for free. Otherwise they'd have a standalone printing app which would not have been as convenient for the users.

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