[tekstar]

The good old days were terrible!

Uncompress tgz

./configure.sh

Missing dependencies

Find those tgzs

./configure.sh

Missing dependencies

Find those tgzs

One won't run on your system

Try to hack the dependency out

Give up, you didn't really need that anyways

[speedgoose]

The old joy of watching logs of a stupid GNU script checking basic features of the GNU C compiler. Just in case someone installed a compiler that had a different implementation.

[dTal]

And it checks them before checking for missing dependencies, so every time you fix a dependency, you have to do the whole rigamarole over again.

[m4r35n357]

Yeah hitting the up arrow a couple of times then return is a real pain.

[dTal]

I was referring to the tedious wait for the configure script. It might not seem so bad now, but what's a mild annoyance on modern computer with an SSD is quite the interruption on a few hundred MHz and spinning rust.

Another thing I wish it would do is give you all of the missing dependencies up front. Aain, not so bad now, but it was a major hassle for me when a missing dependency meant a long walk to the local library, 4gb flash drive in hand.

[Avamander]

Especially lovely now when one might want to use clang and some CFLAG you set breaks a bad check. It's also very annoying to correctly pass PIC and PIE flags when the makefile builds both libraries and executables. I loathe automake.

[lubesGordi]

Really not that bad. Almost always, configure make make install. And the main thing is the expectation. We always expect there to be dependencies and we expect to install them by hand and usually they were documented. Any errors would be easily understood (undefined reference or linker error). Now you have these systems that try to do things for you, you expect things to just work, when they don't your expectations are slighted and you get mad. The upside of all this tooling is the same joy you'd get in the 'bad/good old days.'

[lima]

Easy for a user, perhaps, but imagine maintaining it!

[RNCTX]

The FreeBSD or Debian port maintainer maintained it for you.

The seedy underbelly of all of this stuff is that most of the libraries and dependencies and pet projects that somehow became ubiquitous never worked outside of the lone developer's laptop, or the one compsci department's ancient from-scratch installation, etc.

And if you asked him why it didn't work he'd tell you to go fuck yourself.

[d0m]

I remember when I was a kid I tried for days to install gentoo and it just was not working. After so many hours of banging my head against the wall, I realized the CD was corrupted. Re-burning the iso fixed it