Alright, I know this is uncharacteristic for my tumblr these days, but this is pretty much how I feel about dependencies on Windows. All the time. I waste entire life (or at least, entire summer life) messing with dependency bullcrap. All I wanted to do was use C++ to put a picture on the screen, and it became a several hour time suck trying to get CMake to work to install a graphics library (and all the dependencies of its dependencies…). So then I moved to Python and PsychoPy, but the only reasonable way to install PsychoPy on Windows is to download their standalone package that includes Python. So now I have three versions of Python installed (2.7.3, 3.2, and PsychoPy’s 2.6.6) and I have to mess with my PATH to get everything in the right order.

The alternative option was to add their dependencies to my 2.7 installation, but that would be an endeavour worthy of the above .gif times three. Trying to handle the fact that PsychoPy has a dozen (literally, count them) dependencies, the fact that there are three Python package managers (pip, easy_install, setuptools) and none of them seem to work 100% of the time…

It sucks and I much prefer writing code. Even if the code uses the subprocess module and calling kill() doesn’t actually work on Windows so I have to borrow a function that makes calls to the Win32 API… That is better than managing dependencies outside Unix. Because it means the software for running my experiment is almost ready!