Force apt-get to ignore dependencies?

[Benjamin Scott]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:50 AM, Tom Buskey <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> It's nice/sad to see Debian getting the symptoms of RPM hell that people
> always bring up.

  Debian -- or rather, dpkg/APT -- has always had the exact same
behavior as RPM/YUM, it's just Debian bigots (who crawl out of the
woodwork whenever package management is mentioned) were too blinded by
zealotry to understand them.

  Both RPM and dpkg properly warn you if unmet dependencies exist.
Both communities developed tools to solve dependencies for you.
Debian came up with APT and put it into their distribution from an
early age, which was a big win for Debian.  Kudos to them for that.
RPM derived systems had several different tools for a long time, which
meant the command(s) to use varied by distro and release.  You might
use autorpm, rpmfind, up2date, etc.  It wasn't until much later that
everyone standardized on YUM.

  Additionally: There have been (or were) more people building
third-party RPMs for a long time.  Debian has long had the most
"native" packages in their repository.  Debian has a very slow release
cycle, so Debian people are more likely to be running similar systems.
 Thus, Debian users were less likely to encounter a third-party
package that had incompatible dependencies.

-- Ben