[ale] linus doesn't like Debian?

[Jim Philips]

On Thursday 23 August 2007 02:05:15 pm John Heim wrote:
> From: "Jeff Lightner" <jlightner at water.com>
>
> > The comment about dependency hell was a reference to what occurred
> > before yum - one would try to install an rpm only to be told they needed
> > another rpm which in turn would require another and so on.  Yum on the
> > other hand will let you pick the package you're interested in and find
> > the dependencies needed to install it on YOUR system and install those
> > at the same time.
>
> I think the reference is actually to the circular dependencies problem that
> used to be so common. I switched from Red Hat to debian a few years ago.
> But you used to get a situation where package A would depend on B and B
> would depnd on C and C would depend on A. Supposedly you could force it to
> install A which would break the loop. But that didn't always work.
>
> Friends of mine tell me that never happens any more. Besides, it can happen
> in debian apt too. It's funny because when I first switched to debian, I
> had way fewer problems with apt than I have had recently. Try upgrading
> from sarge to etch, it is very difficult.

I have had a few freaky things with Kubuntu. I'll go to remove some seemingly 
inconsequential package and apt-get comes back and tells me it will also 
remove the entire Kubuntu desktop. Wha?!