Dear Synopsys

[prince_eric]

I really thought that this time would be different, that you were better then Cadence. And after the install of both the license manager package and the hspice package, I was pretty happy and thought that my biggest worry would be fighting off requests from $ee_prof to "just install all of it."

Unfortunately, I should have realized that the reason why I refused his request (that you had 47 package directories on your FTP site, each with at least one sub-product that had files for each supported platform, many with more then one product, and some with more then one version, making downloading "everything" a week-long exercise (download bundles; install bundles; read docs for each bundle to determine how to configure environment; repeat for second platform)) was really an indicator that there was Cadence-level suckage hiding underneath the hood.

And I'm not talking just about the fact that you have multiple ways to "install" products -- an install program, one that uses some sort of Java install wizard, and one that bizzarely consists of "unpack a series of .tar.gz files, and they'll all unpack to this directory, and that's it". I use the term 'install' in scare quotes because quite frankly, exploding gzip-ed tarballs isn't really an install in any meaningful way (and as an aside, why can't all you assholes deploy things using the native packaging format for the platform you're installing on? Bastards....)

No, this time we're discussing your documentation. Personally (and this is just me, here) I'd rather that you just didn't provide any documentation at all, rather then putting out stuff that's outdated and wrong. It was bad enough trying to figure out what we're entitled to run with our licenses -- I have 500 features according to the license server, a 40-page printout from your website with every version of every product you have that I can download (and the instructions on how to download each one is two clicks away from that page, which is one that gets dynamically generated from a script. Dicks.), and a professor that doesn't know this product other then to say "Well, one of the executables I want is 'foo'." Finally, after digging up enough information to figure out what things that the professor wanted installed, I got to look up each one, and try to install it. That was mostly OK, though the 5 or so packages I couldn't find because the files and directories you said I needed to download didn't exist was annoying. As was the fact that not only do you put stuff into /rev, but also /rev_a, /rev_o, /pier and, supposedly, /home/site. Though interestingly enough not /product. Of course, you'll also note that I refer exclusively to the FTP site, and make no mention of trying to do this from your 'experimental' web site, mainly because that appears to be an experiment like the ones that create large gelatinous masses that try to eat downtown Chicago.

But, I downloaded what I could, and installed it, and started looking through your documentation to try and get everything configured so that the users could use the product. And while I was able to figure out that you'd actually renamed some of the executables, instructions that are quite literally "see if the executables for this package are in your path, and if not add them" are somewhat less then helpful, seeing as how you provide some shell scripts with the same names as executables, but not everything that's an executable has a shell script, and even starting to randomly add things into my path to see if I can find the magic combination doesn't work.

So here we are. Wednesday. I've spent all day Thursday and Friday fighting to figure out what the hell we have licensed, and what we need to have installed, Monday hunting down (most of) the packages on your FTP site and downloading them, and yesterday and probably all day today trying to figure out how to configure this whole mess so that people can actually use it.

At this point, I'm officially afraid of the Agilent box that's been sitting in my office.

Comments

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

...I think you'll forgive me laughing at this.

If it helps, I laughed bitterly.

(I am the person who tries to talk $ee_profs out of taking the "just install all of it" line with the $sysadmin.)

that appears to be an experiment like the ones that create large gelatinous masses that try to eat downtown Chicago.

*snarf coffee*

[prince-eric.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, I'm avoiding the Synopsys documentation at the moment -- I've futzed some with tickets, and kinda poked at things with a stick (metaphorically speaking), but really I need to just sit down and start plugging at this again.