Pants Full of Unix

Installing software from Group1. (MailStream Plus at the moment, but Code1-Plus, Merge/Purge Plus, and Dispatcher4 were all the same way.)

Every single piece of the software comes with a (braindamaged) install shell script.

I need to patch every single one of those install scripts with this:

--- install.orig        Thu Aug 28 16:05:29 2003
+++ install     Thu Aug 28 16:06:08 2003
@@ -291,7 +291,11 @@
                        sed -n '2p' |
                        awk '{print $4}'`
        ;;
-       SOLARIS|OSF1|DGUX|LINUX|TRU64)  SPACE=`df -k $G1DIR |
+       SOLARIS|OSF1|DGUX|TRU64)        SPACE=`df -k $G1DIR |
+                       sed -n '2p' |
+                       awk '{print $4}'`
+       ;;
+       LINUX)  SPACE=`df -kP $G1DIR |
                        sed -n '2p' |
                        awk '{print $4}'`
        ;;

Why, you ask?

Oh, because I’m installing onto this partition (regular df -k output):

host.employer.dom:/export/linux
                      48007968  29744736  17783136  63% /u01/app/linux

df -kP shows this:

host.employer.dom:/export/linux  48007968  29744736  17783136      63% /u01/app/linux

Now, any guesses as to what the installer does without that patch?

It claims that I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH DISK SPACE AVAILABLE. “I have 16 goddamn gigafuckingbytes available. That’s plenty for your horseshit little 22 MB install, you pissant piece of shit!” I’m pretty sure most of you reading this can count MB and GB… but just for the sake of analogy, this is like a doctor’s telling a male virgin that he’s pregnant. It’s so patently false, it’s comical.

::sigh::

In point of fact, GNU is partly to blame here. G1 was merely assuming POSIX/SuS conformity out of Linux. Granted, that’s ALWAYS a bad idea, but still, you can see how they might like it to be true. What with its being, oh, a standard and all. One that developers of Unix-like OSes ostensibly respect and try to match so that software will be, you know, portable.

BUT that by no means excuses G1 for having created software that is too smart by half. Trying to warn you of a problem but misdiagnosing that problem (in the “false positive” sense)… and then they made grevious error number two and had that broken software be in the installer. So I’ve got this really nasty taste in my mouth about the whole thing before I actually get to the software they spent serious time with… the software which we are, at present, evaluating. Good job, jerkwads.

Guess I should count myself lucky that installer was a shell script and not a binary, right? Because, then, you know, I’d be doing this by running the installer under a debugger and twiddling memory when it got to the right step. Which, while clearly carrying higher geek cred, would probably have me out shooting up the 7-11 this weekend or something.