debian dependecy hell

[Peter L. Peres]

On Thu, 29 Jul 2004, Christopher Browne wrote:

>> In general apt-get does not understand packages installed with dpkg -i
>> (why not ?).
>
> apt is aware of the packages for which you have sources defined in
> /etc/apt/sources.list
>
> If you install a barrel of packages that the packaging system doesn't
> have "sources" for, thereby _destroying_ the systems notion of
> dependancies, well, there's no surprise that this caused you grief.

But I did not do that at all. All libs were fetched from the internet via 
apt-get install. Unfortunately I do not have a Debian cd here so I tried 
to d/l as little as possible.

My source package requires some modern libraries, from testing/unstable. 
The system itself says it is testing/unstable. More of the latter 
apparently ;-) But again, *I* pushed the button.

> If you use dpkg to randomly install .deb files that you found somewhere
> on the Internet, then you are destroying the integrity of the packaging
> system, in _exactly_ the same manner that installing random .rpm files
> found using RpmFind.net will "break" an RPM-based system.

I did not install *any* random stuff. The way I understand it, I forcibly 
updated a library on which kde depends and the apt system then tried to 
update the entirety of kde (but it did not ask for upgrade, it asked 
whether to remove the packages, and *I* said yes - my mistake ?).

> What you did was guaranteed to destroy the integrity of the
> distribution's capability to manage packages.  You're not going to
> _ever_ see an improvement on this.

I expect the distribution to be somewhat tolerant of people doing 
non-standard things with it. F.ex. I ran Suse for a few years and it had 
its package manager, and it did its thing, and I had my development stuff, 
which I managed using tar.gz files, and we were happy together. Suse yast 
would even refrain from overwriting config files which I edited and tell 
me about it at each update/config run. I never had a problem of this kind 
with yast (like adding my own devel library to the system and it trying to 
tear down everything because of it).

> Pick another distribution, apply the same approach you took, and you'll
> get much the same set of grief, albeit with the possibility that another
> distribution might silently go along with the attempt to reinstall
> things before libraries crumble into a pile of crud.

The point is, I did, and they did not give me any grief. The only one more 
intolerant was RH, it would overwrite things with a vengeance, leaving me 
to chase changes in huge ls-lR files.

Peter
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