New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire) [LWN.net]

New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 16, 2013 11:52 UTC (Tue) by mstone_ (subscriber, #66309)
In reply to: New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire) by maxiaojun
Parent article: New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

some dependencies must be met before the package installation can begin, others can be deferred until a later stage. This makes it easier to avoid dependency loops (where packages indirectly depend on each other to be installed before they can be installed) but does raise the possibility that a package that can't be properly installed can leave another in an inconsistent state. Note that this is usually not catastrophic; the big problems arise when someone freaks out and starts hacking things up manually in an effort to force a solution.

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New Debian leader seeks more innovation within project (ITWire)

Posted Jul 17, 2013 10:32 UTC (Wed) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link]

>some dependencies must be met before the package installation can begin, others can be deferred until a later stage. This makes it easier to avoid dependency loops

To expand on this: dpkg's principal purpose is more of an internal utility used by packaging tools which handle the dependency resolution. Using dpkg to install packages manually should not be recommended for anyone who doesn't already know how to deal with that, as they're working at a lower than intended level of abstraction.

If you have a .deb which you want to install and have the dependencies checked and resolved for you (assuming they're satisfiable), you would be better off with gdebi. Despite the name, it is not just a Gnome application but also has command-line and KDE interfaces available.