[weland]

That's largely because you still have the package manager to resort to in order to take care of most dependencies. Prior to that, you'd still have to install (a lot of) dependencies by hand. Not all of them used autotools, not all of them used standard install locations by default... it was pretty atrocious.

In fact, I remember that one thing which kept me on Debian for a long time was that it had so many available packages. Back then Debian was even slower than today and many of those packages were a little old, but it didn't really matter to someone who was just discovering things.

It's easy to forget about them, but package maintainers are incredibly important in today's Linux (and *nix-inspired in general) world. There's a lot of hard work behind the fact that you can just apt-get whatever new program you found out about.

[dalke]

What I find hardest (as a manual installer) is those packages which were designed with a package manager in mind and end up depending on many third party packages rather than incorporating the needed functionality.

As an example, program X might need to compute a statistic like the skewness of a distribution. A stats package might implement the skewness calculation, so the author of X adds the dependency and calls the right function.

However, building the stats package might require a Fortran compiler and some matrix libraries, since the stats package does much more than compute skewness.

Another approach would be for the author of X to incorporate the few tens of lines needed for the skewness as part of X. This is of course more work for the author X, so I can well understand the desire to simply declare it as a dependency.