For example, when I play with Flup and instead of the threaded server I want to use a forked server. And I realize that the latter requires the socketpair function, which unfortunately is only available from Python 2.4, which is available on Debian Sarge, but for Python 2.4 there is no Psycopg in Debian Sarge - which in turn is a prerequisite for Django and PostgreSQL, which is why I am dealing with FastCGI in the first place. Installing Psycopg itself is no fun, as you not only need the PostgreSQL headers that are normally installed, but also a few internal headers - so in principle a build tree. And then you also need the egenix-mx-base headers, which you can only get for Python 2.3, so you would have to install that yourself as well. Backports from the next Debian version don't work either, as they are just switching to PostgreSQL 8.0 and Sarge is still using 7.4 and I didn't want to upgrade the whole system right away. And so you go in circles and feel a bit cheated by all the dependencies and version conflicts.
And what do you do as a solution, because the threaded server unfortunately only produces segfaults in Psycopg? You take the threaded server, forbid it to thread and start it via the spawn-fcgi from lighttpd, or directly from lighttpd. But that's somehow stupid again, because then there are always 3 threads per FCGI server, two of which just stand in the process list and do nothing. And all this just because mod python2 (which is needed for Django) requires Apache2, which in turn requires mod perl2, which is incompatible with the old mod perl, which is why a whole bunch of my sites wouldn't work anymore if I switched to Apache2. Which I don't want to do anyway, because Apache2 with mod python is damn slow. And once again I feel cheated. I really should have looked for a more meaningful job.
If you didn't understand anything: doesn't matter, it's technology, it's not important, I just wanted to say that.