As I reflect back I couldn't help but notice something odd: each developer uses a different set of Ant targets in their daily routine. The fun begins when something goes wrong:
Berlin, I just did an ant update, and the server wouldn't start now. Do you know why?
Sorry, I never do ant update. I always do ant get_all. Ask Ninju.
Ninju, Ninju, Help!
Oh, you are in the Build directory. You should be running from the dev directory. Just do an ant from there.
But wouldn't that take, what, like two hours?
You can run ant quick_compile then. That'll skip the part that takes too long.
Thank you!
(Later) Zhicheng, Ninju told me to do an ant quick_compile from dev, but it still doesn't work!
No, ant quick_compile deletes a directory that you need. Do an ant gen to get it back.
OK. (Ran ant gen.) No, it still doesn't work. Hey Cathy, do you know anything about this?
They send out an email yesterday about the latest changes to the build scripts. There is a batch file that you need to run only once.
Could you forward me that email?
Sure.
(Reading email) Ahh, I need to go to dev/config/versioning and run version_gen.bat. That fixed it. Thanks everybody.
We wouldn't dream of inflicting such pain and confusion on the users of the software we are building. Yet we do it to ourselves. We are users too. We are users of the build scripts for the project we work on. If the build script is not right, we all lose productivity.
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