[Hampshire] Dependency hell (Was: Re: Xorg is hungry today.…

On 10/05/2009 04:30 PM, john lewis wrote:
> On Mon, 5 Oct 2009 16:11:09 +0100
> Philip Stubbs<philip@???> wrote:
>
>
>> 2009/10/5 Stephen Davies<stephen.davies@???>:
>>
>>> .deb Hell ??????? wtf?
>>>
>>> We all know that it is only rpm's that give you hell!
>>> (Now where's the 'only pulling your leg emocion?')
>>>
>>> I for one have not had an 'rpm dependency hell' for well over three
>>> years.
>>>
>> Nor have I. Then it was about three years ago that I started using
>> Debian :-)
>>
> nor have I, but then I stopped using rpm based systems when I dumped
> RedHat 5.1 and moved to a distro with 'proper' dependency control based
> on dpkg/apt and more recently aptitude.
>
>

I realise I'm probably in the minority here as a Fedora user rather than
using a Debian based system, and I do remember the dependency hell from
the bad old days of RedHat systems before Yum came along.

But one thing I don't understand is the differences between the actual
package format that causes the dependency hell.

From my understanding the thing that means you don't get dependency
hell with .deb packages purely because of dpkg/apt (I don't run debian
so perhaps my terminology is incorrect, I mean the debian equivalent of
yum). That there wasn't anything intrinsic about the .deb package vs the
.rpm package that meant the "dependency hell" was avoiding using .deb
packages.

I don't want to start a distribution flame war but I was wondering if
someone could explain why .deb packages don't have "dependency hell" but
rpm's do. Especially as I've not had rpm dependency problems since yum
came along to sort them out. From reading around there doesn't seem to
be anything in the .deb package that backs this up, there would appear
to be different packaging policies for the distributions, possibly
better tools for creating a .deb package (although there appears to be 2
sides to the debate there too!), but from an end users perspective I
can't see the difference in terms of installation problems.

Can anyone enlighten me? (without entering into a flame war).