Mega compile...

So, I wanna get my finances in order again.

I've done this several times in my life, and each time the work involved has been longer as the family finances steadily complexify with student and other loans, pension plans and tax-free savings, weirder and stranger revenue streams, taxes in two countries, a state and a province, and kid who is now of legal age in Canada and desperately trying to get a job and add a multiplier to the complexity.

Needless to say, I need a software which is up to the job.

Which, oddly enough, I actually know of. I've tried pretty much all the major labels, and the only one which can manage it is Moneyworks. Which is, undoubtedly, an excellent software, but has defeated three efforts to get it set up and running because it's too bloody intense. Accountants may love it, but I do not. Quicken and QuickBooks fail to meet specification. But the free software GnuCash has worked wonderfully for me in the past when I tried it. It was intuitive, well-explained, the set up was reasonably painless, and I got just as much functionality as I wanted even though the software was clearly more powerful.

And then I migrated to another computer, operating system, had an HD crash, blah blah blah, and I didn't keep up with my finances.

Once or twice over the intervening years I've tried to recompile the software using a package managing system which was supposed to keep up to date with the necessary libraries and dependencies. And each time it has failed. At the same time GnuCash has itself complexified, and now has more than 150 dependencies. Not a manual compile project for the faint of heart.

Still, after spending as much as I have on financial packages which haven't worked out, I think I need to put in the sweat to see if GnuCash is still as viable an option as I remember it being. So I spent a couple hours getting the latest compilers and Quartz libraries from Apple (Quartz is the window managing software that gives a Mac the Mac look and feel, as well as a butload of of OS services, because Mac quite literally 'floats' over the top of hyper powerful unix operating system.) Then almost 3 hours installing a large package manager and library as a completely clean install.

And then I wound it up and set it loose.

Now, this dual core intel laptop is *not* a power house. But it's steadily chugging away on the list of dependencies. So far, in 12 minutes, it's downloaded, verified, extracted, patched, configured, compiled, staged, installed, and activated 11 packages. The fan is blowing at top force, and my little cpu activity monitor seems pegged up around 80% with occasional bursts above 100% for each chip (which I *still* don't understand.) I've been here before, and I know that each round of dependencies will take longer to compile as they build on each other and slowly create a skeleton and flesh it out one layer at a time.

I'm going to make a guess this is going to take until sometime tomorrow afternoon or so, unless a fatal error causes the manager to explode.

Which, if I'm completely honest, is the outcome I'm expecting.