[kwlug-disc] is it just me, or is debian package management painful?

[Chris Frey]

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 04:56:02PM -0400, L.D. Paniak wrote:
> The main point of the deb system is to make sure that you stay on the
> "approved" course of packages and do not start breaking your system by
> adding random packages with conflicting library dependencies and the like.
> 
> First thing you should do is update your Debian install 5.0 (Lenny). 3.1
> (Sarge) has been obsolete for quite a while now.  I doubt that your
> Sarge can be updated in place without breaking it badly.  Probably best
> is a fresh install of Squeeze, the current testing version.

Amen!  Preach it brother! :-)

If I *have* to support an old distro, I'm likely to grab the debian source
package and recompile it on the target system.  It's usually not too hard
if it is a small package, but this doesn't always work perfectly.  At least
I know the dependencies will be correct then.

Also, if you have the .deb already, you probably got it from somewhere,
and the dependencies may already be available in a repo of its own.
Somebody had to have built it, so the dependencies are out there.

Trying to manage deb files using the hack and slash method of a Fedora system
is like swimming upstream.

- Chris