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Not just Oracle, but software companies that assume that there's no *chance* that a mere mortal might be able to select, install, and use their software without comprehensive training or hired consultants. Oracle's software has a reputation for being at least somewhat good. Despite this they provide NO FREAKING DOCUMENTATION for installation of their Linux client software. Google it? Good luck -- everyone's interested in installing the server. Forget your client-only dreams. After poking and prodding for a fair part of about two days, running 'strace' on the process trying to figure out which files the program is actually to access, setting an undocumented environmental variable, and getting it to finally work on one of a few machines, I was pretty well frustrated with the software. The fact that it worked on one machine taunted me further. I compared binaries. I compared the libraries they were linking against. I made sure the (undocumented, at least within Oracle's own packages) configuration files matched exactly. I was comparing strace output piped through diff to try to find anything which might explain the difference in functionality. I noticed that execution began to differ after the program read from a particular configuration file. Sure enough, the Oracle client couldn't handle the fact that my mailer had somehow converted to Windows CR/LF line termination, and refused to operate because somebody was too hateful towards their users to write a configuration file parser that didn't vomit worthless error messages when confronted with something so difficult as ASCII 10. I hate Oracle I hate mailers I hate lack of documentation hate hate HATE. Is Larry's dislike of all things Microsoft so thorough that he insists that his software fails in obscure ways when confronted with so much as a Windows text file, punishing users for so much as letting a configuration file hit a Windows machine in its path to something UNIXy enough not to raise Larry's hackles? HATE.
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