Think, quote, escape
Evidently Jamie had got in before me. Somehow he’d unpacked the new 2U server and balanced it on the side of his desk. He looked hassled. I didn’t ask. The server’s fans whirred noisily. On Jamie’s second monitor I could see the familiar chatter of Linux installing itself. I stepped over the cardboard and polystyrene, sat, woke my machine.
Moments later I heard the install disk eject. Jamie typed something, cursed. The disk clattered into the bin. The room grew quiet as the server shut down.
We were a small, new team. Nonetheless, we’d put something substantial together. It built on a Java framework and ran on Linux. We’d tweaked the framework, meaning we had to build it from source before building our own stuff, so a clean build took almost half an hour. Just over half an hour later, Jamie had burned a new install disk. He placed it in the server’s DVD drive. The fans roared up again. Ten minutes later, more cursing, another disk in the bin.
I walked across. Jamie was glaring at some code. A Perl list? His cursor was poised over an item in this list, a single-quoted string, inside which was a sed command, whose arguments themselves needed quoting, which was evidently meant to edit the contents of a double-quoted string in some configuration file. Think: quote and escape. I could see there were four DVDs in the bin. Jamie must have been in for some time. No wonder he looked hassled.
So, what’s up?
A trade show in the States. The salesman was out there. A bare machine had already been delivered and he needed the software, so Jamie had to cut a DVD which would directly install the operating system together with our application. Please don’t expect a salesman to download an ISO image and set up enough of a network to boot from it. A courier was booked for midday to collect the DVD. That’s what’s up. So leave me alone and let me get on with it.
He didn’t actually say that last bit. It’s true, though, he was the Linux expert. I stubbornly watched as he changed some double quotes for single ones, added a couple more backslashes, checked in the file, kicked off another build.
Back at my desk, I reviewed the version control change logs. Evidently Jamie was working on a post-install script which took the form of a list of actions which would be evaluated and executed in Perl. Looking at the file diffs, the sticking point seemed to be a sed command to edit the X display settings. Embedding sed within Perl was proving tricky.
Jamie’s edit-build-burn-install-check cycle seemed crazy to me. Why not recreate the broken post-install step as a standalone operation? Soon enough I’d found a way to reproduce the problem. After reading documentation and experimenting I figured out how to nest and escape the various strings. I admit, it took me longer than I expected. By this time Jamie solved the problem by trial and error anyway — and as proof he had an install disk which he knew worked. He may well have spent less time actually concentrating on the issue than I had; the build-burn-install phases of his process all ran as background activities.
In the event we needed to revise the software anyway. So the salesman had to download a new build at the last minute. Jamie stayed late the next day to talk him through the installation.
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