NYCPHP Meetup

[charles at softwareprototypes.com]

Hi,

I don't want my money back, 

I want the thing to work. It works on RedHat, or so I've heard... 

But my directory structure is slackware8 with some mods by a sys
admin friend of mine to my box to give me dual drives mirroring each
other.

I hate to think that I'm going to have to screw up my system as it
stands now just because they don't know how to write an installer
script. I really don't want to lose all my settings, etc, to install
RedHat over my current, working, system.

I've had too many systems crash on me to ever trust my web site, even
though its just a little vanity piece right now, to a single drive
system again. Even if I do burn my backups to a rotation of CD-RWs
everyday and to CD-ROM every week.

The problem with the ZendStudio_Server installer is that it sucks
eggs. And the yoke's on YOU.

Its BAD. Real CLI amateur-hour crap. Make a mistake and it crashes on
you and didn't store the answers you gave it the last time so you
have to re-type everything all over again. I have a neurological
problem so this is a real pain in the [expletive deleted]. Sometimes
it might be my typing or maybe not. All I know is that it fails to
install.

There is no documentation explaining the nature of the questions its
asking and there's no info to help you disambiguate when you find
multiple directories with the same name. (Which one's right? How the
[expletive deleted] should I know?)

Their support is no great shakes. They don't seem to understand that
their installer sucks. The last time we emailed back and forth, they
referred me to their http://www.zend.com/install_instruct.php page
which says:
- - - 
          * Download the Zend Studio Server package and place it in a
temporary folder on your machine.
          * Login as root, or a user with superuser privileges.
          * Extract the .tar.gz file you have downloaded:
               1. tar xzvf
ZendStudioServer-x.x.x-Linux_glibc21-i386.tar.gz
               2. Then, run the script ./install.sh (for dialog
based) or ./install-tty.sh (for command line interface)
               3. And follow the instructions in the installation
script.
- - -

Yeah.... Right...

               3. And follow the instructions in the installation
script.

The instructions in the installation script are terrible, obscure,
non-intuitive, not the least descriptive and impossible to actually
follow if you need to deviate from a stock standard install and can't
just keep hitting enter.

That's why I'm inviting some total stranger, any total stranger who
could help, to my house for food and beer. Then we'll write up what
the problem was, how we solved it and shove that back at Zend with a
big "Thank's for nothing" note attached.

-Charles-A.

---- Original Message ----
From: gherson at snet.net
To: talk at nyphp.org, 
Subject: Re: [nycphp-talk] Installing ZendStudio_Server. Anybody know
how?
Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 17:12:58 -0400

>Yes, contacting Support is worth a try of course, but don't expect 
>them to admit 
>their bugs.  They sure didn't with me.
>
>When you insist on your $ back, the passphrase is persistence pays.
>
>george
>
>
>ophir prusak wrote:
>> don't you get support when u buy the product ?
>> 
>> I'd ask zend for help.
>> 
>> ----
>> Ophir Prusak
>> Internet developer 
>> prutwo at onebox.com | http://www.prusak.com/ 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ---- charles at softwareprototypes.com wrote:
>> 
>>>Hi,
>>>
>>>I bought ZendStudio 2.0 Client & Server. While I was able to 
>install
>>>_Client stuff without a hitch,  the _Server is proving to be a bear
>>>to install on my slackware-8 box.
>>>
>>>Basically their installer (a perl script) sucks. It asks questions
>>>that I can't figure out or can't find/disambiguate the right answer
>>>to. (I do "find / -name '<whatever>' -print" and come up with X
>>>answers, which one am I supposed to use?)
>>>
>>>End result... I've wasted my money for want of some explanations.
>>>
>>>Does anybody want to earn my eternal gratitude, some nosh &
>>>brewskies, coming to my house in Jersey City and helping me with 
>this
>>>recalcitrant install?
>>>
>>>-Charles-A.
>>>
>>>
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>
>
>
>
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