I'll say it again: Fedora Core is beta-quality at best

I'll say it again: Fedora Core is beta-quality at best

Many, many years ago, I was running an Unstable box, and something was damaged in an upgrade to perl. This appeared to completely break the package management system. I don't remember exactly what broke, but I was completely stuck and unable to do much of anything. Dpkg seemed to be in some bizarre half-installed state. It wasn't fixable because the broken dpkg wouldn't run, and no other packages could be added or removed because of the broken installation program. I couldn't fall back perl versions without doing it manually. I wasn't particularly good at Linux yet, and this was way more than I could handle. Ended up reinstalling the box... which fortunately wasn't too painful, as it was just a toy workstation anyway. I avoided unstable for a good long while after that. :)

I haven't seen a dead-end like that in all the years since. Unstable is indeed unstable, and it's not at all uncommon to have a broken package for a week or so while some incompatibility gets worked out, but I've never again been jammed into a corner where the package system itself was compromised. There has always been a shovel available to dig me out of holes.

But it did Really and Truly Break one time. :)