"rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around - nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution."
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Member since:2005-07-09
Agreed. I've yet to have a case these days of dependency hell, but I have had cases of "dependency heck" -- the milder form once every blue moon on Ubuntu.
I tried installing a package (I can't forget which one) from universe a month ago and found that it depended on version CVS of a package (that's what the package name was called) but only version N was what was available because another more popular package depended on it. I had to download the CVS version of the DEB manually (apparently it wasn't included in universe because it conflicted with version N).
Granted, universe isn't officially supported, but I'm willing to bet that both conflicting packages could have worked for either or it would have been possible to set up different installation directories and environment variables and have them both be installed. It's possible to do both with configure-make scripts and often possible to do with binaries (if they don't hardcode paths), so it's clear that apt-get isn't ideal.
I don't know if Conary solves this problem though since this issue occasionally trips up even source based Gentoo if you install masked packages.
Member since:2005-10-02
Member since:
2005-07-24
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And on what planet would that be?
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I work a great deal with systems running Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu. And I must say that for the last several years I have been a bit puzzled when people start going on about dependency hell. Sure, there are a lot of interdependencies, but the package managers handle it so well these days that I rarely have to pay attention.
In particular, with Ubuntu it sometimes seems as though all I have to do is *wish* a package onto a system and it's there.
In fact, I went to install a third party package with gdebi (mozilla plugin) the other day, and even gdebi worked out that another package was needed and offered to install it.
Anyone who is still having dependency problems (if such people actually exist) needs to write some stern words to their distro's maintainers or find a distro that isn't stuck in the 90's.