nuggets from the dumb monkey sack

We've got a new developer in the group. As he's installing all the supporting tools he'll need for the projects he'll be working on, he came to me when Ant stopped working. Odd messages about Ant core/tools version incompatibilities.

We fiddle and fiddle with JAVA_HOME, with ANT_HOME, with PATH... No luck. Same messages, despite the Ant we want being right there at the start of PATH and in ANT_HOME.

Like a revelation from heaven, I realize... wait... what's in CLASSPATH? Well, there's a Documentum Jar in there... but that wouldn't have stuff to do with Ant, right?

The documentum Jar in question turned out to not have any classes in it, but it did have a giant list of other Jars in the manifest's classpath. Including Ant. More specifically, a local install of Ant 1.2 beneath the Documentum installation.

As much as I'd like to blame Sun for not providing a non-insane standard for application startup, I think its more appropriate to vent at EMC/Documentum for creating an installer that modifies the system's classpath environment variable to add their kitchen-sink Jar. For as much money as they charge, you'd think they could write an installer that doesn't screw up your system.

I'm not sure why I was surprised. Nearly every other interaction I've had with Documentum has been an exercise in agony. They must have a burlap sack full of exceptionally dumb monkeys deciding how their software gets installed and configured. Other nuggets from the monkey sack:

• No desktop application needs to talk to more than content server, right? Well, if they do, they can manually edit this INI file in c:\windows.
  
• No desktop application needs to talk to more than one version of a content server right? Well... if they do, they can uninstall/re-install to do so.

I can excuse their crappy, obfuscated APIs. Still hate them, but I can understand inflicting them on software developers. But to screw things up for all the end-users, QA, and support that need to use their crappy desktop apps, seems mind-numbingly stupid.