20:36 Wednesday, March 03 2007

developers who suck

I got a bug from this no-name tiny developer yesterday that seemed to require the 'GLee' library to build. I've never heard of GLee before, and it doesn't come up in the first 50 results on google either. So I read through the readme that came in the GLee zip archive that this developer provided, and it talked about either building from source or installing a binary. Well, there was no binary in the zip archive, and the readme was very explicit that to build from source, a Makefile was required. Guess what? No Makefile either. So I attempted to compile this developers little test app manually by just including the GLee.h, but that didn't work at all. So I gave up, and politely asked them to provide build instructions. Apparently I hurt his massive ego, because his response was a long string of insults about how I should really know how to build software if I'm going to be a test engineer. WTF? So he provides a new tarball that supposedly has everything needed to build the app, and he also includes a precompiled binary (which thankfully worked). I attempted to build his app using the Makefile he provided, and guess what? It still wouldn't build. This Makefile (if you could even call it that) was nothing more than a massive list of hardcoded variables & paths (everything, including gcc, make, etc). And the hardcoded location was buried in his \$HOME somewhere, so its not like I could have just done some minor editing and had it run. Even after doing a ton of search & replace work, it still wouldn't work. Clearly this fool knew nothing about how to generate or create a Makefile, yet had the audacity to attack my competency?