What is yak shaving?

Posted on: Thu 11 October 2018

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.