So, I'm trying to install Jagwyre on the old PowerMac I keep headless in the server closet for other people to use to test Parrot stuff on. No big deal, the thing's running OS X 10.1.something, so the 10.2 upgrade should be just a matter of whizzing through, right?
Sure.
Of course, I do know better. Something will go wrong. And, of course, it did. That wasn't a problem. The problem was that I couldn't find out what the heck was actually wrong!
This machine's short on disk space, it's only got a 3.7G drive on it and it was full up from the OS 9, OS X, Dev Tools, and Fink install. There was only about 800M free on the thing, and the base upgrade wants 1.3G free. No big deal, right? I'll just deselect the bits I don't want. Not like I need any printer drivers or asian fonts on this thing, as it has no printer attached and runs headless most of the time.
No dice. Installer starts, throws up a helpful error message "There was an error. Please restart" (or something very close to it, and that's it. No logs, no extra info, no "press here for some clue as to what went wrong", nothing. Isn't that just special?
Every working programmer should have to do time on the front lines of phone support. All of them. Especially the ones that think they're too good for phone support. I am so fscking tired of software that's profoundly useless whenever anything goes wrong. If you know enough to know that something went wrong, you had damn well better have enough information to say something. What didn't work? Why not? At least where in the program did it go wrong?
You, as the programmer, know. You have to--you had to check something to see if it failed. And if you don't know what the heck something is doing, you at least know what it's stopping you from doing. (If you don't know that, what the heck are you doing checking for the error, then? Or, for that matter, writing code at all?) Make that information available somewhere, even if it's not glaringly obvious. Doesn't matter if it's any use to the average end user, it'll at least be some use to the poor sap who has to try and figure out why things failed. Which ought to be you on occasion.
(And, for the record, the problem was that I deselected some things for installation, which while a perfectly valid option according to the installer, made the install fail. Why the installer cheerfully let me choose bad options and then not tell me is a matter for another rant)
Posted by Dan at October 24, 2002 03:44 PM | TrackBack (0)