Hackery to Change this Project

Its one of those days, those days where all the best laid plans get utterly screwed over... The reason for this conclusion...?... Well, there is a major project due by Friday, we're a man down and it seems of all the people here I'm the only one working delivering something.

But that's not the problem, the problems today have all been coming from elsewhere.  First thing I was asked whether I had any idea about a certain class in the code... I didn't... I looked and, it was literally called a hack and had then been commented out, but it remained a dependency within other places throughout the code.  But the person asking me seemed to think I knew about this class, seemed to think it was mine...

Lets see, its not commented, its not documented, its called "Hack" and been nastily deprecated by changing its name - telling me that it was removed by someone not doing whole system rebuilds to check themselves.... There is a person who fits just such a bill around here... So surely that direction needs looking at!?!??!!?

That's one thing, the next thing... I can't build the system!  Why...?... Seems certain branches, undocumented, without forethought have been converted to include new projects which use some horrid third party library from sourceforge... Without documentation I was asking the person whom had pointed me at this branch for advice and was informed that it should all work... "its builds for me".

I puzzle over this, finally giving up and looking at this third party project on source forge... its just a hacky project to take an XML input (a quite badly formed XML input as it goes) and produce MSI scripts... Why is this in our project branches?... And why is this stopping my build?

Basically, the build affects the Visual Studio tool chain, and allows the build of a new type of file.  Trouble is... I'm not using Visual Studio, the build system I'm using is there for automated building, its using the MSBuild  tool chain directly... This sourceforge hackery does not integrate with the MSBuild environment... Ergo, I can't build from source any more...

Now, this should ring bells, hoot alarms and at least wrangle any decent manager of a project into action... The manager on this particular project... Just shrugs and tells me to get on with "it"... whatever it is...

Someone else, someone not here, has hacked and slashed, someone not here has injected a dependency without any forethought, without even documenting anything... yet this is my fault....

I hasten to add, when I come up with an idea to add something I have to document it, get it reviewed and push it right through from end to end... this other person... just stuck this in... and to run salt into the wound made sure the manager accepted it by getting them to install a piece of software on their machine, meaning they met all the dependencies and were able to argue with me about whether the code builds or not...

Hacks hack hack, change for changes sake, yet again... I'm starting to hate this... Poor project management, no documentation and absolutely no forethought.