There’s a great post on Coding Horror about Configuring the Stack.Basically the gripe is with the complexity of installing the typical developer stack, in this case on Windows, using Visual Studio. My VS setup isn’t vastly different to the one Jeff mentions, and I have similar issues with the other stacks I use. I’ve just set up the Ultra3 mobile workstation again for building MySQL and other stuff on, and it took about 30 packages (from Sun Freeware) just to get the basics like gcc, binutils, gdb, flex, bison and the rest set up. It took the best part of a day to get everything downloaded, installed, and configured. I haven’t even started on modules for Perl yet. The Eclipse stack is no better. On Windows you’ll need the JDK of your choice, plus Eclipse. Then you’ll have to update Eclipse. Then add in the plugins and modules you want. Even though some of that is automated (and, annoyingly some of it is not although it could be), it generally takes me a few hours to get stuff installed. Admittedly on my Linux boxes it’s easier – I use Gentoo and copy around a suitable make.conf with everything I need in it, so I need only run emerge, but that can still take a day or so to get everything compiled.Although I’m sure we can all think of easier ways to create the base systems – I use Parallels for example and copy VM folders to create new environments for development – even the updating can take a considerable amount of time. I suggest the new killer app is one that makes the whole process easier.