On 28 Jul 2005 at 14:39, dhbailey wrote:

> Randolph Peters wrote:
> 
> > I just got off the line with tech support at MakeMusic and they
> > confirmed that there is indeed a problem with the installer erasing
> > the ~/Library/Application Support folder. They just became aware of
> > it 1 hour ago (it is now noon, July 28) and will stop shipments of
> > Finale 2006 until they can solve this. It seems to be a Tiger only
> > problem, but I'm not 100% sure.
> 
> So does this mean that they don't even test the installation in-house
> before shipping?  It's not as if Tiger is that rare, is it?

I can understand exactly how an error like this could be missed. The 
test machines they use are problem machines dedicated to this kind of 
testing, and they probably image them to a particular state before 
running the installer. But since they aren't someone's actual 
machine, they don't notice that the address book and Firefox add-ins 
and so forth have disappeared, since the machines are not actually 
used for anything other than testing Finale.

Now, if that's their only installer testing it's clearly not very 
good -- there need to be beta testers for the installers, as well.

But I do sympathize. The number of installation scenarios that need 
to be tested is pretty large, and it would be difficult to have all 
of them run on real-world machines that someone is using.

I'm surprised, though, that a problem with the installer on Tiger 
would not have been discovered, since I'd expect that to be the OS X 
version being used by a lot of Mac users working at MakeMusic. I'd 
assume they "eat their own dogfood," as the expression goes, and test 
the installer on their own machines, so it seems odd that something 
this major would have been missed.

Likely it is some unintended consequence of some other change to the 
installer script, and they didn't do a full regression test on the 
installer script -- it's very easy to overlook these kinds of things!

That doesn't make it good, though -- it's a signicant black eye for 
MakeMusic.

-- 
David W. Fenton                        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc

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