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Erika Yanovich reports that he group recently upgraded their software: <<I'm
not mentioning the company or product so as not to embarrass them...>>
Maybe you should mention the product? At a minimum, you'll at least be
warning the rest of us to be very cautious before upgrading. Better still,
you might find someone who has a specific solution to your problem.
<<... the links we built with the previous version are completely
incompatible and we have to build them manually using the new version. Their
documentation recommends choosing between building the links and building
the project from scratch! We have numerous on-going projects built with this
tool, some of them containing up to 200 links (and one with about 500). What
would you do?>>
Personally, I'd ditch the upgrade, return it and demand a full refund
(claiming that they concealed a major flaw in the software), then keep
maintaining the projects in the older version. Of course, that may not be an
option in your case. Sometimes software upgrades involve considerable office
prestige, to the point that refusing to upgrade would seriously embarass
someone you'd really rather not embarass. Sometimes the old version really
isn't meeting your needs anymore and has to be upgraded. If either is the
case, you don't really have many options.
If you're at a point in the upgrade cycle when it's time to revisit and
revise the documentation, rebuilding the projects from scratch may not be as
painful as it seems: you'll have to review the projects anyway to bring them
up to date, and rebuilding the links at that point would become part of the
overall task of maintenance. If you don't have that luxury (time and
resources), is it possible that one of your programmers could spend a day
diving into the two file formats and creating a utility that translates
between the two different link formats?
--Geoff Hart, ghart -at- [delete]videotron -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"It's one thing to see death coming at the hands of your own creation.
That's part of the human epic tradition, after all. Oedipus and his father.
Baron Frankenstein and his monster. William Henry Gates and Windows
'09."--David Brin, _Kiln People_
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