Mega compile et tu, Brutus

I was right!

Okay, sort of right. Even though this was a clean install of the package manager, there were a few hangovers from the previous install - including dbus. I'd forgotten to completely remove that, so when the new install compiled it and went to stage it for activation... it crashed, bringing the entire compile to a screeching halt.

That was about 10pm last night, and I didn't feel like dealing with it as I was already in bed. (You know it's bad when you notice the sudden quiet as the computer fan shuts down and realize something is wrong...) So this morning I removed the vestiges of the previous version, manually compiled dbus and startup scripts, and restarted the mega compile. Then headed out the door to bring the kid to school.

I fully expected the computer to still be cooking when I got home an hour and a half later, but it was quiet with a nice little note on proper startup techniques for the successfully compiled gnucash binary. Hope against hope!

Dashed when I tried to run the software! Dbus errors flying all over the place! oh yah, I hadn't rebooted since removing the old version and recompiling. And as soon as the reboot was completed - voilà! GnuCash lives! Went to start the tutorial...

Crash. Documentation not installed.

Okay, cool, I can live with that. The package manager can install the docs. So I fire it up. And it begins compiling FireFox-X11.

FireFox, if you didn't know, is also a hyper-complex piece of software with dozens, possibly hundreds, of dependencies. It's certainly at or near the bleading edge of browser development, outstripping its primary rival Internet Explorer, and is a really great piece of software. And I tend to use it by preference.

But I use the Quartz compile, not the X11 compile, because the Quartz window manager is native on a Mac while the X11 is, frankly, cruder. So I really really don't need FF-X11; I just need the documentation for GnuCash. But some idiot at the package manager insists that FF-X11 must be installed before downloading and installing the docs, and of course FF-X11 refuses to compile on my machine at the moment, and I cannot determine why.