I’ve just spent the last half-hour downloading yet more tools I need onto my main workstation. My workstation is around 1 month old – consequently, it doesn’t yet have that “wealth” of utilities, tools and must have “thinggies” (its a technical term 
). So, when I find a project that I’d like to explore, I find that I need to satisfy a zillion dependencies!
(The cases in point tonight are CVSNT and the J2ME toolkit. Those who know me may have a clue as to what the project of interest is…. 
)
I have a utopian solution to this problem, based on Perl (as all good utopian solutions are!). Perl has the famous CPAN repository – full of indispensable modules to expand the library. Too many indespensable libraries, in fact. So there exist a range of “bundles” – metapackages that simply point to other packages. So, you can pull down the Bugzilla package which in turn pulls down all the Perl packages required by Bugzilla.
Be cool if you could do this for something like “Developer-0.6″, right? Automatically brings down GCC, CVS, MYSQL, etc. Well, it’d be nice…..