The last couple of days I was working on a new setup for software development. I was surprised (actually somewhat irritated) by the efforts needed to get things working.

All the components I needed did not seem to work together: Eclipse, PHP plugin, Git plugin, html editor.

The same happened earlier when setting up for a Python project and some APIs (one based on Python 2, the other on Python 3).

I am still trying to think through what is the core problem. So far I can see that the components and platform are designed to integrate, but the tools all depend on small open-source components in the back, which we find incompatible between the components. 

Maybe there should be a less granular approach to these things, and we should move to (application) platforms. Instead of picking components from GitHub while building our software, get an assembled platform of components. Somebody, or rather, somebody, would assemble and publish the open source platforms, periodically, say every 6 months.