More software installation
Thought it might be fun to try to install and set up PocketMine-MP, a Minecraft server that would allow multiple mobile-device Minecraft instances to connect over the Internet.
But downloading it and running the install command resulted in an error message indicating that my compiler was missing.
So I ran the command to accept the license agreement for the Xcode command-line tools, and then went back to trying to install the server.
But this time, running the server's install command resulted in a wget error message.
Turns out my version of wget is old.
But downloading wget and running its install command results in a pkg-config error message.
Turns out I don't have pkg-config installed, or maybe I have it installed in the wrong place.
But downloading pkg-config and running its install command results in a Permission denied error message. Even though I ran it as superuser. Presumably because the file it's trying to open (.deps/localcharset.Tpo) doesn't exist.
Turns out (for complicated reasons) I wasn't actually running make install as superuser. Did that.
Installing pkg-config succeeded.
Tried to install wget again.
No package 'gnutls' found
Found advice to run sudo apt-get install libgnutls-dev.
That popped up a dialog telling me that I didn't have X11 installed and offering to show me an article about how to install it.
So instead I downloaded gnutls. But it was in a .tar.xz file, which tar on OS X doesn't seem to recognize.
So I ran unxz on it, which gave me a .tar file. So then I extracted the files from the tar file and ran the install command.
It gave me an error message saying that Libnettle wasn't found.
And at this point I decided I have better things to do than try to install this software.
About halfway through that sequence, I started to get a certain sense of deja vu; it was just like last time I tried to install Unix-like software. And all the other times.
I think I may have successfully installed only about two or three command-line tools ever. Every other time, I get about four or five levels of recursion deep, searching for how to fix cryptic error messages and discovering I need to install yet another tool, and then I just give up.
Frustrating and disappointing.
(And yes, I've seen the most recent relevant xkcd.)
(PS: And yes, in the past I've tried Homebrew and such. Those approaches also always end the same way.)