Is it just me, or do you end up installing raspbian over and over again on a complex project?

For everyone's laughs, i'll share this weekend. I installed fresh buster on the pi, set up samba, set up a windows share. Got sound recording with usb mic + playback via headphone jack + powered speakers, and used rsync to back it up. Installed pulse audio, configured it, backed it up. Then I installed only the deprecated google assistant and got it working fairly easily. so I used rsync to back it up again. Installed the drivers for my sound card hat, only had to play around a little bit to get it all working, backed it up.

So I guess the plan with taking intermediate backups had me being just cautious enough with everything else that it all more or less worked the first time. I spent more time waiting on rsync than actually installing or modifying configs

Glad to hear you had some success.

Sometime between when you did your first install (not working) and now (working) some repository may have changed. This can be frustrating unless you develop the understanding things changing for the better is not such a bad thing:)

most of these were older, the google samples I had to go backwards through tags on their github to find the one I wanted. I think maybe my subconscious got a better understanding of asound.conf and how pulseaudio works.

Also this time around I realized that if you have the google assistant running and exit out "poorly" (still not sure the exact scenario) it locks/kills the pipe to output to that sound device. Starting it again does not fix that. So I imagine that may have been what happened to me in the past, when I thought it wasn't working.

Yes a good showing of poorly written software given out as "examples". But people will take and reuse in discriminatory in production and wonder why not working as they imagined. Such is the state of software in the wild. I think easyejl found out with Google!

I've seen it so many times over the years, but somehow I think it gets worse as we go. The more open source software there is, the more libraries people use for small sections of them (like with typescript using Moment just for formatting the date for screen) and things end up with enormous dependency grids. Not everything stays self contained, so you end up with accidentally breaking one piece by installing something else. At work we've just gone through a pain in the neck over a new release failing to build at first, then failing to have everything work correctly primarily because a reference was added to an outside service that cause a chain of dependency updates.

ok part of it also is the way our build/release process is for that particular product

I've seen it so many times over the years, but somehow I think it gets worse as we go. The more open source software there is, the more libraries people use for small sections of them (like with typescript using Moment just for formatting the date for screen) and things end up with enormous dependency grids. Not everything stays self contained, so you end up with accidentally breaking one piece by installing something else. At work we've just gone through a pain in the neck over a new release failing to build at first, then failing to have everything work correctly primarily because a reference was added to an outside service that cause a chain of dependency updates.

ok part of it also is the way our build/release process is for that particular product