BEHOLD, for I am the Angry Technician, and I am the gatekeeper between the cheap cardboard box your software arrived in and the hundred-thousand-pound computer network that is my Domain.
Heed my commandments and thy software shall pass unscathed onto the user’s workstation, but beware! Failure to obey will bring my wrath upon thee and thy company, resulting in profuse swearing and a pithy blog post.
- Thou shalt hire someone who actually knows what they are doing, for your skill in creating educational Flash games that prove inexplicably irresistable to teachers does not necessarily translate to any competence in enterprise-grade software deployment.
- Thou shalt use Windows Installer, for if I cannot use Group Policy Software Installation thy software shall be cast forever into the round file.
- Thou shalt not use Windows Installer to wrap a legacy installer, for this is heresy and never works properly.
- Thou shalt ensure any options your installer needs can be scripted, for if I have to type in the licence number on every single machine I will find you and break your fingers.
- Thou shalt allow me to choose the location of the shortcuts, for arrogance in assuming you are important enough to have a shortcut on the desktop will be punished in the afterlife, or sooner if ever we shall meet.
- Thou shalt not display any user interface during a silent install, for this is non-standard behaviour for Windows Installer and means you have screwed it up somehow.
- Thou shalt allow me to disable the auto-update feature, save for if it can update without requiring the user to have administrative privileges that they cannot be trusted with.
- Thou shalt not install out-of-date prerequisite software, because if I have to rip out one more 2-year old copy of Java that has massive security flaws, a plague of locusts will consume your cubicle. Don’t think I can’t get them, I know a guy.
- Thou shalt only make changes to the system that are actually relevant to your software, because I do not need to clean up after your installer that accidentally copied 28 shared system files from your Windows XP computer onto my computers running Vista.
- Thou shalt not refuse to install just because you think my computer is too slow, because I didn’t ask for your opinion, I asked you to install some software. The only person permitted to insult my computer is me. If I say my computer can run your software, it can run your software.
This is perhaps the funniest post for a few months. I mean the others are all funny, but this one has obviously been thought about a lot before writing.
Keep going
My thoughts over many years of enduring crap setup programs went into this post.
MANY, MANY YEARS.
And may your will be done.
(may I suggest a bit of Spanish Inquisition may also be used if locusts become unavailable)
Good plan. They won’t be expecting that.
Ah-ha! Nobody expects the……. Oh forget it! :-)
Good God, that is hilarious.
Having taken the painful but strong stance at a number of schools that non-compliant software (software that doesn’t comply with the above) should be consigned to the round file – at secondary and at primary schools alike, all with poor decisional leadership and a penchant for software built for Windows 95 and/or Quicktime version 2 – I feel in the morally irreproachable position of being able to enforce these commandments with true integrity.
Bravo. I’d be happy to fund the publishing of communist-style pamphlets of the above and distribute them freely at education software trade shows.
Conversation in the office has suggested you might want to include a number 11: “Thou shalt not install the fucking google toolbar”
And lest we forget the cardinal sins of progress bars and estimated installation times that lie, installations that cause a users profile to fill with unnecessary stuff (Adobe), applications that are not really multiuser aware (relates to AT’s rule 1 above) and installation routines that like to install start up programs that display a logo in the system tray (just so the user can fiddle with the settings and break the program).
I’d add “Thou shall not require Admin or Power User rights to be used.”
I work as a desktop soe guy. Apps which require admin rights, GIVE ME THE SHITS.
Most applications themselves should not require admin rights, but in my book it’s perfectly acceptable for the setup program to require admin rights; in fact it’s preferable in many cases. Allowing limited users to install anything they want is a recipe for disaster.
Yes, you’re right, it is ok for setup programs to request admin rights. There’s a group policy setting which even allows for this (Always Install Elevated).
The idea that programs NEED admin rights to run is abhorrent. It’s not as if applications packaging standards have not been available. Microsoft have provided advice since 2003 on how to create installation packages.
For the curious: http://blog.wisefaq.com/2008/02/12/plan-now-to-eliminate-power-users-from-your-domains/