debian dependecy hell

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sat, Jul 31, 2004 at 11:12:06AM -0400, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> 
> >>I am giving up on this distro for now.
> >
> >Well your loss.  It's not the system's fault when you tell it to do
> >something unusual, and then don't know what to do when it needs help to
> >continue doing the unusual thing.
> 
> 'giving up' is relative. It is still running (I am posting from it), it's 
> just hard to shoehorn it into doing what I need. Basically nothing is 
> broken, but kde is deinstalled (it depended on the library I forced in).
> 
> On Slack if you need 5 versions of a library you install them and they 
> coexist. I still have a 1.2.13 system running and I know this. There is no 
> similar system on Debian ?

Debian does permit multiple versions of libraries, if they are actually
different major versions, so that they don't ahve the same name.  This
is why debian names libs something like: libpng12 or libpam0g, rather
than just libpng or libpam.  Whenever a new API is made to the lib, the
name shoudl change and so does the package name, so that programs using
the old API can use the old libs, and programs using the new API need
the new lib name.

Where things can break is when packages demand a specific version,
rather than just a minimum version, which causes things to complain or
get uninstalled.  The kde and to some extent gnome packages are terrible
in this respect.

The -dev packages (containing headers and static libs) depend on
specific library versions, so if you manually install a library, make
sure you manually install the maching -dev package as well just in case
you ever want to compile anything using that lib.  It should be
available from the same location.  If you don't, then the package system
won't be able to install any -dev package for the lib that matches it
(unless a newer one is avialable to upgrade both the lib and the -dev),
and it will give the kinds of complains you got.

Lennart Sorensen
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