I was referring to the fact that if you work for an employer who has moved from in-house developed code to third party software there can be incredible restraints in place regarding what can and can't be done with their code. At the moment the Housing system that I was going to convert to be run by Perl is written in UNIX and there is no provision for auto error/fail checking. This means that the bulk of our programmers early morning work is checking prints etc to see if there were any failures. In the old days (mainframe) I had written a method for automating re-runs using user object nodes etc(written in SCL). Thinking I could do the same in Perl I realised that the third party software that we use - no source code available to fix the rubbish! - was so piecemeal I was constricted by it as far as automating failures was concerned. No step is a single action and it's failure might mean the re-running of another previous step. Add to this the fact that we could get a new release up to 4 times a year and you should appreciate that writing an automated system around this MUST be kept very simple - not my idea of heaven but I'm just a grunt! Now I've taught myself Perl and convinced my bosses of it's superiority over UNIX scripting but working for local government means that we have no money and productivity rather than elegance is the order of the day. In this regard I don't think my situation is unique! So when I ask for a bit of advice that's what I'd like to get not someone in a more fortunate position than myself spouting prejudice!

In reply to Re^3: Go to? by Ronnie
in thread Go to? by Ronnie

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