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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1536 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 24, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Best I can do is complain about how wonky the budget is for a somewhat important piece of shipping software. You'd think we could get $ENTERPRISE licenses squared away easily, we're not some fly-by-night shop. Because we don't have $ENTERPRISE licenses we apparently aren't allowed to install $TOOLS I need to unify our Unix and MS build processes, and we can't just stand up a build server running, say, $DROP_IN_ENTERPRISE_ALTERNATIVE or something on it because policy. Devsecops is goofy.

Also, as a sidebar - apparently barely anybody has put in the effort to try to build $WELL_KNOWN_INFRA_TOOL for Windows on Unix in the last decade and a half, and somewhere down the stack it just completely blows up because of preprocessor hell in a cross-build environment. My favorite thing in the world is when a header is included with nice and neat capitalization that doesn't match the actual file's (entirely lowercase) capitalization, so it builds just fine on MS because MS filesystems aren't case-sensitive and dies on Unix because someone wanted their includes to look pretty. I have done black magic to this dependency tree to get it close to building and then it still dies because of platform-specific linker options that are getting improperly set in a CMakeList. There's reasons why we're building this from source instead of using a package for it, but it's a huge morass of fiddly that I'm allowed to keep bashing my head on because if we get this to work, the payoff for our whole CI environment is huge. Somehow I've only had two drinks in the last six months.

(Apologies if you find the formatting obnoxious but I'm trying to keep a minimal degree of opsec.)

MinGW and MSVC capitalize their header names differently, so it's possible they were correct for the person who wrote them.

My civil-engineering organization only recently upgraded from a version of CAD software that was literally twenty years old—not for budgetary reasons, but because the old codger in charge of the CAD unit saw no need to upgrade, and dug in his heels to resist upgrading until just a few years before he retired. There were regular problems with renewing the license for it.

Ooooof, that sounds rough. At least my shop is aware of the licensing problem - part of our major infra push is an effort to fix it, but we're still kinda kneecapped by policy at the end of the day.

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