Yak Shaving
The chain of prerequisite tasks between you and your actual goal: to fix the bug you must upgrade the library, which needs a new build tool, which needs... and now you're shaving a yak.
Heard in the wild
“I spent all day yak shaving just to get the dev environment running.”
Tone check: Technical
Universal engineering experience. Budget for it; the yak is always hairier than estimated.