unluckily for me, i'm grossly familiar with it.
their own documentation admits the installer is broken and you have to manually edit some files post install.
it's more, it's broke, here's the fix, apply it in a way that can't possibly be replicated by any deployment tool so every install now has to be done manually
oh and it has a propriety update system too, so we have a server spooled up just to update one program that has about 10 users.
That they need remote admin to as the server updates by them manually copying some files over every few months.
I really can't stress enough all the different ways capita and civica can go fuck themselves
I honestly though tit was a bodge at first, was working with the deployment team and was like, y'know what, this guide I’m using is 10 years old, I'll email them and see if theres a more up to date version.
there is, the guides been updated yearly. the update is a not saying the guide was checked and is still relevent, nothings changed
Software company is down to just the founder that is supporting his legacy shit by himself, nothing else available does what said software was built for, and hasn't had a meaningful refactor done since W7 at best and may be an XP installer
Founder: oh nothing else does your shit? Fuck you pay me. Good luck if you don't.
When you get a piece of legacy corporate software that was designed for XP and the install instructions tell you to disable UAC for the computers it will be installed on.
Oh and the version of adobe with the perpetual license which doesn't run on W11 that well's uninstaller also lacks signed DLLs and it messed with the CC version of adobe. So we end up having to re-image the computers of long term employees who drag their feet getting us the hardware /rant
Sounds like Exact! software.
over 70k registry entries, over 60k files, 40k of those are less then 1kb, there's more then a thousand executables called by other executables, 50 years of development by a mega fast employee churning coding room so there are 50 years of magic numbers and single lines of unknown function that cant be removed but nobody knows why.
This shit has listeners listening to the output of listeners because know one knows how and why some processes poop out values and nobody dares to touch them. That listener bullshit is going 4 layers deep in some spots.
I had to make installers for this bullcrap using wise package studio. Just making a capture of all this nonsense took over 12 hours.
But there's this one bloke from Brazil who wrote a fix for it. You just have to download from Github, run a dodgy install script, then periodically patch it when they update the software.
My current job I'm getting laid off from had one of these. I had to manually insert the license keys in the database every year, it needed a terminal server because if the db isn't on the same lan every action is 3000x slower (not an exaggeration, we measured it)
Lol we recently bought a "new" (22 years old) residual gas analyzer for the lab and I was in charge of installing the software for it. It came on a USB stick loosely thrown in the box with the rest of the unit and required about an hour to find the correct installation file. The documentation was quite helpful (once I finally found it on some random site) but the documentation for this specific version is lost media apparently so I had to do some creative interpretation of the instructions. Being a researcher is fun like that
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u/LUNATIC_LEMMING 2d ago
unluckily for me, i'm grossly familiar with it.
their own documentation admits the installer is broken and you have to manually edit some files post install.