Hunting the Internet to track down random dependencies, watching freshmeat.net every day for new releases, and fighting with all of the different build systems was what I did every day ca. 1997.
In other words, installing (and upgrading!) software in Windows has not made much progress since 1997. I blame MS's decision "oh sure, you can integrate your program into Windows Update, it will only cost you $BigBucks per year."
Hunting the Internet to track down random dependencies, watching freshmeat.net every day for new releases, and fighting with all of the different build systems was what I did every day ca. 1997.