Warning: Long rant ahead!

So we built an amazing system for managing swarms of drones, and we have flown hundreds of hours, testing, etc.

Comes a client and says, that he wants to buy our system, but he wants to integrate it in a bigger system that is supposed to orchestrate many small systems.

Sounds like a deal.

So they send me on a week course (see previous rant: https://devrant.com/rants/2049071/...) to learn how to integrate our system in theirs.

I was sure that they have some API or something and it should be a breeze. but apparently they give us an SDK that includes all their files, and we have to build and run their entire system, and then build our own API inside of it!

And the reason we needed a week-long course, was to know all the paths where the XML configuration files exist!

So for the last month, I am hacking away inside this huge program, navigating thousands of files in a language I don't know, in order to build an API for their system, so that I can use it on our side.

Yesterday they informed us that a new version is available.

And sure enough, waiting in my inbox this morning was a link to download a new SDK.

No Changelog, No Instructions, Just a zip file with over 25,000 files.

So I phone my contact in their company to ask how exactly I am supposed to update their files, and his answer was: diff them!

WHAT! 25,000 files, half of them built by the c++ compiler, tens of configuration files scattered in different places, linking all the new libraries from scratch, are they crazy or what?

And then he tells me that they are working for 15 years this way. That's why everyone hates them I guess.

going to have a long day...

P.S. many more rants to come from this integration.