Apt dependency hell

[Neil Joseph Schelly]

On Wednesday 29 November 2006 02:48 pm, Ben Scott wrote:
>   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.

Understood... I'm actually one of those sick souls that uses Stable on my 
desktops with just the occasional backport.  I'm not sure how Testing does in 
comparison.

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

Noted.

>   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?

I suppose it's possible - that was never my understanding, but I guess I never 
researched it too closely.  I do know that dselect never used the same 
sources and list files as apt-get for example though, so I always figured 
they were perhaps linked against the same APT libraries that would include 
functionality to open deb packages and identfy dependencies, but not 
necessarily to resolve them.  Google or debian.org I'm sure has the answers, 
but if it hasn't mattered to me so far, I don't expect it does now. ;-)
-N