A question of support?

[sawyl]

Had a classic user request today. The guy had a helpful set of data manipulation tools, which he'd sold to the head of his division as the cat's pyjamas, which he wanted us to install and support centrally, and he would have given us detailed instructions on how to install it except that, oops, he couldn't actually get it to build. In the end, it turned out to be even worse than it sounded: he couldn't even get it to pass configure, so he hadn't realised that the yacc code wasn't accepted by our incredibly retro version of bison and the parts that would actually compile wouldn't link.

No wonder he wanted someone else to take on the support...