Daley Ponderings

Since we paid for the professional license, we get OpenMake for "free", so I figured I would try it out. The conclusion is that it isn't worth anything.The longer version is that it, like all Merant products, is quite hard to actually get up and running. When the manual says, "you aren't required to enter the host name for the license manager during install", what they meant was, "we forgot to put the dialog in, so you will have to go hunt for license.ini and modify the file, but it probably won't work the way we tell you, so just start commenting things in your license file until you get it to work". As a sidenote, # works as a comment in the merant.lic files, which is handy when you are messing around with things.
I have a license server that works fine with Version Manager, but the format to tell OpenMake how to find the license server is different than Version Manager and Tracker. Since my license server is the same machine as the Knowledge Base Server, I tried hard-coding the path to the license file, but that didn't work. I was able to copy the merant.lic file out of the license server directory and replace OpenMake's version, and then cut and paste stuff from the evaluation version until it gave me the real/non-expiring licenses. Ugh, what a pain.
After I actually got into the program, I quickly discovered that it is junk, and it would be easier to write my own scripts to do regular builds. The Java interface doesn't work at all how you would expect, and every operation is rather difficult. After studying the examples, I find out that you have to duplicate the makefile commands in OpenMake's GUI thingy, which will never stay in sync with the regular project. That is the biggest problem for me - our developers won't ever update the project in both places.
Lesson to Merant: don't make stuff "platform independent" at the cost of making it unusable on all platforms.
Off to write my own scripts, which we have avoided for some time, since we already paid for OpenMake, and figured it would be better to use someone else's code.