Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Mar 2007 23:07 UTC
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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.