Drinkable Chicken

[semi-rant]

It’s one of those days again. I am trying to install fish on my iBook G3. The laptop is ancient, but it runs Tiger and MacPorts and has the latest XCode, so there really should be no problem. Yet there is. The MacPorts version of fish seems to think it needs all kinds of graphical libraries… cairo, libtiff, freetype, and much more, none of which I need for a command line shell. Needless to say, at some point installation chokes on one of these libraries or another. Is there a way to tell MacPorts that I just want the text mode version? Who knows? It’s easy to use when everything goes right, not so much when things go wrong.

So, I figured I’d download the fish source, and compile it “by hand”. That might have worked elsewhere, but not here. I don’t even get to the compilation stage, because ./configure complains that there is no libiconv present, and this is a requirement to build fish, so it stops unceremonially. Problem is, I have four different versions of libiconv sitting on the blasted machine. Four! Three via MacPorts, one I compiled and installed manually. And it somehow can’t find any of them?!

This kind of dependency hell happens all the time, and is the main reason why I am interested in trying GoboLinux. It’s just not fun anymore when you have to wait for hours while the system attempts to fetch, build and install a gazillion dependencies and then chokes somewhere, with no obvious reason as to why it did so, or what can be done about it. I’m not sure if Gobo fixes all these issues, but if it can alleviate them even just a bit, it’s worth it.

(To be fair, fish does install without problems, using MacPorts, on my MacBook Dual Core. But with other packages, I have just as many problems on that machine, if not more. Plus, you get the nice “oh, you have x86_64 libraries installed, but I only accept i386/universal/whatever” (or some variant thereof) error messages.)

I would love a system where these things “just work” and where you don’t have to dive into all the gory details of a library you’re not even remotely interested in, but that somehow indirectly is required to install the software you do want. I mean, this *is* a Mac right?!