It's a good day when you get to create and use a variable called $misbegotten_children when patching a plugin to work with PHP5. Too bad the CSS is so hosed as to make it an unworkable plugin; a few tweaks here and there and we'll have threaded comments for everyone!
Now that I'm on Dreamhost, I've got to remember how to get around Debian as a regular user, using ftp and ssh access to update and backup files. I've already gone to CPAN to install some Perl modules I use in a couple of scripts, as I can't just install the Debian packages (no root access to the server, which is as it should be). I've gotten used to sudoing at will when I need to (and I'll admit to logging in as root on my server), and while I'll be able to do that on my server, it's like all of the sudden having a dual identity: one has all the power in the world, for values of world less than or equal to my server, and the other is just an average joe, kicking around in someone else's playground. It's a playground with which I'm extremely familiar, as it is running Debian; I know where everything is, and if I don't have the most paging program, I know of various ways to acquire it. Or I can get by with less.
Is this a threaded comment?
Nope; the threaded comments plugin breaks Tiga's CSS, so the plugin has to be modified for it to work with Tiga. I assume that this is the case with other themes as well, so it makes me wonder if it is possible to abstract the problem and write a better plugin. Then again, the idea of threadedness is displayed via CSS, so there's always going to be some overlap between the plugin's modification of the comments template and the theme's CSS for that same template. It's a tricky issue, but fun to play with.
Well I tried. Yay.