So in the process of trying to make my desktop box marginally more useful while I await the arrival of a replacement power supply for my notebook (moral: I should not be allowed to play with electricity lest I make things go sparky-spark), I decided to try installing some software. Naturally, this involved upgrading stuff. Naturally, this involved looking for six packages to install one, and ensuring I had the dependencies for the dependencies. Naturally, me being me, I gave up and said “screw it” within about an hour. It wasn’t worth it.

Especially after I discovered that, oh, by the way, at some point in the last three years we changed glibc versions.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had a machine with an obsolete shared library, but it’s a lot like being in hospice care. You know you’re going to have to face the horrible truth at some point in the future, but you can put it off by patching stuff up or taking high-test analgesics. Eventually you’ll reach a point where you decide it just isn’t worth it anymore, and give in. Basically, nothing new will compile. Which means you’re SOL if you want anything fun or interesting.

I am told that Slackware’s upgrade path is marginally less painful than it used to be, inasmuch as it is theoretically possible to get away with updating everything to the latest versions without actually rebooting. (I’ll believe that when I see it, thanks.) And I guess I’m going to have to plunge in and do the upgrade, which is a dangerous thing for a guy who can’t update his kernel without hosing LILO and spending half an afternoon trying to remember which magic incantation makes LILO happy again. (I’ve forgotten again — really worrying.)

And yes, I fully understand that whatever hacker cred I used to have is fully gone by this point, and I am totally fine with that. This was driven painfully home the other day when I realized a Microsoft product was the most reasonable solution to a problem I was trying to solve, and it didn’t make me want to cry.. and that the “open source software” alternative made me want to think about buying a shotgun.