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What is yak shaving?

I know things like the Jargon File exist, but I'm having fun writing this.

There is a gif from Malcolm in the Middle that's been floating around the internet for years that explains Yak Shaving better than I ever could.

Yak Shaving

It's basically when you need a series of often trivial things before you can do your main goal. The way it was explained to me was:

Your friend asks you to restore a WordPress site onto their server, it should take 5 minutes to do so you say sure.

  • You want to restore WordPress from a backup
  • but to do that you need to update their PHP
  • but to do that you need to fix a broken dependency on an old PHP package
  • but to do that you need a library that has to be compiled from source
  • but to do that you need to install a GCC
  • but to do that you need to fix an issue with their apt-get
  • but to do that you need to schedule a reboot
  • but to do that you need to ...
  • ...
  • ...
  • but to do that you need to hike to the top of a Tibetan mountain and shave the hair off a Yak.

Tibetan Yak

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