I am slowly trying to assemble a minimal Linux development 
environment and the number of tools you need to just compile a C program 
is unbelievable. Clearly, the majority of developpers don't care about 
simplicity.

     Recently, to compile vdev, I had to build libuuid from the source. 
libuuid is part of util-linux. As usual, there is no Makefile, so that 
you cannot build libuuid alone. To generate the Makefiles, you must run 
configure, which invokes autotools which are written in Perl. But, for 
some obscure reason, you also need Python! And util-linux's configure is 
not happy with the way Python is installed in Debian Wheezy. It doesn't 
tell it clearly, of course; it just throws inconsistent messages.

     libuuid is a library, compiled from a C source; it should be the 
simplest thing to build. But, in fact, you need to learn some basics of 
Python's file hierarchy and tweak it. Or, maybe, build as root. And, of 
course, your development environment must have not only gcc and make, 
but also Perl, m4, and autotools. In some cases, you also need curses, 
cursesw or yet another assembler more clever than as, or gnulib which is 
yet another fancy probably meant to make Gnu software unforkable.

     Didier