Building and installing packages has gotten easy. I'm running “Fink
Commander” right now on my laptop, and it's chugging away through
building the subversion client.

Back in MY day, when I first got into Unix stuff where you had to
build packages, compiling a package was a hassle. My first Unix
account was SunOS 4, and we didn't have GCC; we just had that buggy
SunOS compiler that all of the “Makefile”'s would complain about. It
took REAL COURAGE to compile something and get it to actually run.

That's why I had personal versions of pine, irc, etc., in my home
directory. No, wait; the irc client was just named “pine” — that's
right. I got some questions about that later.

Maybe building packages hasn't gotten easier; only the package
maintainers have gotten better about organizing their packages for
automated installation.