So I’ve been working on a way to have C callback functions call member functions of a C++ class. To do that though, I’m upgrading to gcc 4.6, because there are some new features in c++0x that I think could help me solve this problem easily.

However, upgrading to a new version of gcc is apparently totally fucking impossible. I’m currently installing it from debian-main, because my computer runs Aurora OS, which is based off of an older version of Ubuntu. So, in order to upgrade, I first went to the gcc website and downloaded the source. However, it turns out that the source also has some dependencies. So I went and downloaded and installed those. Then I tried to actually compile the thing, and about an hour later it errored out.

Seriously.

For whatever inane reason, gcc just refuses to compile on my system. I tried reconfiguring, and I even tried going to an Ubuntu PPA, but it just did not like that.

This is one of the reasons that I find Linux so very annoying at times. There’s no easy way to install things. On Windows, you generally just download an installer, it does a few things, and then BAM! you can run the program. Linux is a lot more complicated. Especially because many programs you download and install the source. Seriously, would it be too hard to provide a nice simple way to do this? Moreover, why are there several locations for you to put binaries? You have /usr/local/bin/, /usr/bin, /bin, etc. There’s a bunch of random places that you could hide something. It’s very simple on Windows generally. It would be really nice if we could get something like this for Linux, like a more advanced RPM or something like that. Because I’m in about hour five of trying to upgrade gcc here, and this is just fucking bullshit.