Apt dependency hell

[Ben Scott]

On 11/29/06, Neil Joseph Schelly <neil at jenandneil.com> wrote:
> It's rather annoying that someone would pigeonhole Debian zealots about saying
> things can't break in a distribution labelled "testing" ...

  Yah, that was why I stated I normally wouldn't have too big a
problem with it.  The problem I have is that I've been told more times
than I can count that Debian unstable is still better than
$OTHER_DISTRO.  Further, these claims usually happen in the context of
"APT is better than RPM because these problems don't happen" claims.
Hurmph.

  Note that I'm not naming offenders.  In particular, I'm not saying
Neil Schelly does this.  So if you're not one of the people who does
the above, don't apply it to youself.

  If you *are* one of the people who does the above, may the fleas of
a thousand camels infest your armpits.

>>   I thought apt-get, aptitude, synaptic, etc., were all just frontends
>> to the "APT system"?
>
> They are all wrappers of dpkg more than anything, just like yum is a wrapper
> for rpm.

  Hmmm.  I had thought that APT (uppercase) was a subsystem of its own
(libraries, calling conventions, files, data, etc.), and that apt-get,
aptitude, etc., were basically just user interfaces to that subsystem.
 I take it that's wrong?

-- Ben