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Obviously, I've been expecting too much from you.

The idea that as a company, you would put the same care and work into your installers as they product they install is well, just too much for you to understand on your own. It's too much to expect that the obvious issue of "The installer is the very, very first thing our customers see, so it should, at worst, be a neutral, painless experience" is just not a concept you can figure out on your own.

So I'm going to help. Because $DEITY$ knows, you are more in need of it than a man with no limbs in a mountain-climbing contest.

So for CS5:

Kill the Adobe installer. Dead. I don't care how, but kill it dead and delete the code. Lobotomies for the people who insist on remembering it are not too extreme here. There is no excuse for that festering, maggot-ridden shitpile in execution or concept. There is nothing about it that doesn't suck. It is not fast, nor is it easily automatable, nor does it make it easy to uninstall the application. It sucks on both Windows and Mac OS X. The answer is obvious: Use the native installer technologies on each platform. Yes, that would require you to have separate installer code.

Suck it up princess, you gave it a good try, but you fucked it up, and you fucked it up worse every edition. (Before anyone says shit, yes, I am INTIMATELY familiar with the changes in CS4. I speak from that experience when I say it got worse.) When the best an idea can manage is continual degradation on all levels, it is time to cowboy up, admit defeat, and use what your enterprise customers have been asking you for.

Some specifics:

1. Your stupid installer still insists on making your file copies suck as much as possible. Let's say the Adobe installer has to create a folder called "Plug-ins" and in that folder are multiple subfolders, and each subfolder has 1 or more plugins, that are all packages. But every file & folder in "Plug-ins" has the same permissions. In the land of the sane, you'd copy over the entire contents of "Plug-ins", then chmod/chown once and you're done. So your logs look like:
   copyfile
   verifyfile
   copyfile
   verifyfile
   chmod -R
   chown -R

   Simple, right? And to be honest, you don't need to log successful copies and verifies, only the problems. Seriously, we expect shit to work correctly. I only need to know about problems. So really, assuming no problems, this entire thing could log as:

   starting $PRODUCTNAME$/Plug-ins install
   changing ownership to <foo>
   changing permissions to <bar>

   Three lines of log for thousands of files, and it goes faster because your copy methods are faster.

   OF COURSE Adobe doesn't do this. Instead, you get shit like this:

   790 Copying file "/tmp/.tempdirDpiClT6r/Assets/AdobeCommon/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html" to "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
790 Copied
User "0" resolved to uid 0 for path "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
Group "80" resolved to gid 80 for path "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
791 Saved owner 0 and group 80 for "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/InDesign/6.0/WSa285fff53dea4f8617383751001ea8cb3f-6d11a.html"
791 Setting owner to 0 and group to 80
791 Set


   FOR EVERY FUCKING FILE. The worst part is, THIS IS NOT NEW. They did it for CS3 too. The logs for CS 4 Master Collection are around 30MB compressed, and over half a fucking gigabyte uncompressed. Text files. Half a fucking gigabyte.

   shit like this is why Adobe installers have to have gobs of dancing baloney. Because otherwise you might realize how slow they are due to this kind of institutionalized stupidity

   Now, I've talked about this before, but since Adobe is never ever fixing this for CS 4, for CS 5...DON'T FUCKING DO THIS. Log the start of a folder copy if you must, and if you must, the results of things like chown and chmod, but not seven fucking lines per file. Also, if a folder has n files and they all have the same permissions and ownership, set it fucking once! Recursive switches, they aren't just for geeks anymore.



2. Stop writing your own installer, you have yet to have it not suck. You know, I agree that neither the Windows MSI installers or the Mac OS X Package installers are perfect for your needs. Too fucking bad, because your installer sucks ass for everyone one trying to remote install your fucking product on multiple machines, and your attempts at automation suck more every time. Stop it. Fucking.Stop.It. Here's a hint...my company is covered by your uber-licenses where we get upgrades for as many computers as we want when we want them.

   However, the unjustifiable pain in your installer means that we aren't even going to look at starting the testing for figuring out how to deal with your shitbag installers until we have to. Meaning, there is a feature in CS 4 that we have to have. Since we're an all-Mac shop, it ain't like we're getting new integration features in Acrobat. (no, I haven't forgotten my great hope that someone comes out with a real Mac OS X version of Acrobat and Distiller and cleans your fucking clock with it, but I'm busy playing with the installer kids right now.) So until there's a technical gun at our head, fuck you and your installer too, you cannot pay us enough to deal with it. Yes, the new attempt at a remote installer in CS4 was an interesting take on things, but it's ultimately a failure because it's fragile as hell and still requires far too much setup and prep work per install.

   If you use the OS-native installers, then you don't have to write your own half-assed automation tool. You just give us a native installer, and we can use whatever tools are out there. On the Mac, that's Apple Remote Desktop, /usr/sbin/installer, LANRev, Casper, LANDesk, and there are just as many, if not more on Windows. It is only your bizarre fixation on "doing it all by ourselves" like some kind of three-year-old Don Quixote that is causing administrators problems. Since you are causing us problems, we make sure to return the favor. If you stop getting your installers from the insanely bad thoughts of the zombie Nixon, we'll stop flaming you like we would said zombie Dick.

   So again for the managers, who are kinda slow: USE THE FUCKING OS-NATIVE INSTALLER, YOURS STINKS WORSE THAN THE SANTORUM LEFT AFTER A RABID DONKEY ORGY.



3. Stop trying to make your file setup as fucking obtuse and stupid as possible. Right now, it is physically impossible to manually uninstall your applications without nuking and paving the whole suite, and no, your fucking uninstaller is not perfect. How complicated is this? THEY USE SQLITE DATABASES TO TRACK THE INSTALLS.

   Installing is simple. You move files from point a to point b, and log it. In the case of Mac OS X, you add a fucking receipt in the right place. Why you insist on fucking this all up is beyond everyone, including a lot of Adobe people I've talked to. Yeah, you can't even convince your fellow employees this shit is not, well, shit. That's a bad sign.

   Here's one, for CS5, how about this for say, stuff that goes in /Library/Application Support/:

   For things relating to a product: /Library/Application Support/CS5/<applicationname>/
   For items shared amongst all applications: /Library/Application Support/CS5/<Shared Items>/
   For Applications: /Applications/Adobe CS5/<applicationname>
   For CS 5 Utility apps: /Applications/Adobe CS5/Utilities/<utilityapplicationname>/

   Look, right there, I just made your shit easy to identify and uninstall, and you DON'T NEED SQL DATABASES TO TRACK THE FUCKERS! There's no reason to overcomplicate it to where your uninstall scripts have to include Python 2.5 IN ITS ENTIRETY so you can uninstall on fucking Mac OS X 10.4. Again, think about this...you have to include a major language framework so that you can UNINSTALL PROGRAMS. The fact this passed the laugh test shows how far up your asses your heads are.



4. One last thing: Stop sneaking other applications in. Yes, we know about Opera hidden in Bridge, even though you aren't up front about it. But then if you were, you'd have to actually apply security updates to Opera too, and we all know you aren't doing that at all. Hiding shit like that is a form of lying, and I really hate that.

So there, some tips and a whole mess o' profanity on how to make your installers not suck worse than a Dyson fired out of the LHC.

No, I don't think CS5's installers will be any better. But at least they can't say "We didn't know you hated it". It's nothing, but it's what we have.

Technorati Tags:
Adobe Acrobat Team = Annoying, Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Installers MATTER

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