"I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal tic

"I once inherited a fairly large c++ application that could only be built on THE dev box, or a copy of it. Only one old timer understood it, it was his meal ticket, and he wasn't talking. It used auto tools so I converted it to cmake so I could build locally. Then I spent about two weeks just reading the code..." I am interested to know what happened to the "old timers" meal ticket?