Slugging Through More Transition Questions
I know it's what was going to happen, but that doesn't make it any easier to live through. This constant barrage of questions from the developers and support staff is really quite draining. And it's not the stuff I've left out of the docs - that I can understand. It's the things that appear to be problems when in fact they are environment issues on the part of the developer that are inconsistent/incompatible with the project they are taking over.
It's a simple job to make a .cshrc file look at the name of the machine - and/or the version of the operating system, and then set up defaults for that box so that the user doesn't have to do any of the changes on his end. Take make, for example. On the linux boxes, it's the GNU Make that's shipped with the RHEL distribution. But on Solaris, you have to be careful, because GNU Make is installed in /usr/local/bin on all our Solaris boxes, but it's also on the shared file servers, and even in the Sun compiler suite - as we are licensed for that as well.
So you have to make sure that you're pointing to the right things, on the right boxes, so that all the simple development commands and such just work. It's not hard. But it takes a little effort. This is why I have told people about where my .cshrc and .login are, and they are free to look at them and see what they might want to pick up for themselves.
Of course, they don't have to do that - they are free to change anything and everything about these projects now that I'm no longer "actively involved". However, if they come to me and they think something should work out-of-the-box, and it's not... then debugging these issues is especially tiring as I was assuming that things are set up correct for the build.
But in the end, I only need to give it a few more days and then it's no longer my problem. It'll be up to the folks remaining to work through all the unasked questions and make sense of the codebase that I've left. There's a lot there to work with, and it's working just fine. But things change... Oh... things change.