debian dependecy hell

[Peter L. Peres]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Anton Markov wrote:

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> It's not that apt-get doesn't work with dpkg. dpkg is just a low-level
> that allows you to break the dependency rules. apt-get on the other hand
> does not allow it, and tries to "fix" things by satisfying the
> dependencies. Sometimes this means it tries to uninstall one library,
> which then uninstalls another package that depends on it, etc. It is
> usually best to manually (using dpkg for example) undo whatever action
> caused the problem in the first place.

I understand what you say, but I have to force non-debian packages into 
the system. It appears that this is not (easily) possible. There is a way 
to force packages into the system described in the apt-howto afair, but it 
is not suitable for my purposes.

What I tried to do was, to install a package (non-debian) that required 
very unstable libraries. When I tried to make those libraries co-exist 
with the old ones I failed, using the apt and dpkg systems.

So now I reverted to manual package manipulation and it sort of works. But 
the kde is deleted from this system ;-). I now use window maker and other 
things.

my only consolation is that on Windoze I would have reinstalled minimum 8 
times by now, and would not have had success.

My lesson: Do development on slackware systems and/or using the manual 
library and package install method (tar.gz, compile etc), while completely 
and carefully ignoring the resident package manager, then port the package 
to a package format like deb or rpm.

Until now, I have had bad adventures of this kind with rpm based systems 
(RH and Suse), and now Debian. The cycle is complete. No 'adventures' 
happened on Slackware or BSD. There, all the mistakes were mine, and could 
be fixed without taking down the system.

Peter
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