I wonder whether someone running software that old would even be interested in automatic dependency resolution. I figure if they’ve not upgraded in such a long time, it must be because stability is so important to them that they are quite willing to endure the pain of installing complex software by hand – along with all the other tradeoffs that come with running nearly decade-old software.

In other words, I’ll make a token effort to not make deployment on such systems gratuitously difficult, but I also don’t see why I should make my own software development gratuitously difficult. There is a balance to be struck; abstaining from all progress is not it.

Makeshifts last the longest.