Apt dependency hell

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Wednesday 29 November 2006 01:12 pm, Roger H. Goun wrote:
> Neil Joseph Schelly wrote:
> > This doesn't look like APT dependency hell, whatever that would be.  It
> > looks like Dapper no longer has a package for MySQL 4.1.
>
> This system was originally installed early in Dapper development, when
> MySQL 4.1 was what you got. Later in Dapper development, MySQL 5 became
> the default. We weren't sure if all of our legacy apps could run on
> MySQL 5, so we held back the updates, resulting in a system that ran but
> had a mix of up-to-date and deprecated packages. Now a
> seemingly-unrelated change broke some Web sites by removing the obsolete
> package containing php4's mysql.so.
>
> > At the very least, you should consider upgrading to MySQL 5 if you can
> > make it work.
>
> That's what I'm trying to do, but apt doesn't recognize that
> mysql-common is no longer
> satisfied by mysql-common-4.1, thus my comment about dependency hell.
> (Admittedly, it's a
> different kind of dependency hell then you normally get on RPM-based
> systems.)

Well, I guess that's unfortunate then that Dapper wasn't in a steady-state yet 
when this was setup.  I would try to get a MySQL 4.1 package from Breezy 
Badger.  If you pulled this from an early version of Dapper, perhaps it had 
more in common with Breezy.  That would allow you to get your 4.1 
dependencies taken care of anyway for now.

Ultimately, it may be in your best interest to either begin building a new 
server on a release version of Dapper and migrate to it when your 
applications are tested or build a new server on something like Debian 
stable, where you can be more assured that packages will stay in the tree for 
the whole life of the product.

Either of them an option?  I guess there's also a chance that someone has 
built MySQL 4.1 packages for Dapper from wanting to use Dapper with older 
applications too.  Or you could always compile it for yourself, but don't 
forget things like php-mysql that will potentially want to be recompiled 
against your custom libraries too.

I think you may be a bit beyond any cleaner solutions than these.
-N