dpkg: Update failures
Dear Debian users,
I found Debian's package management strategy often frustrated me.
Because I'm behind a Wingate, I don't have direct access to http or ftp.
Someone suggests set http_proxy and ftp_proxy in /etc/environment, but
that seems to be not working. In a word, I cannot find any hostname in a
terminal, and apt-get won't work for me. All I do was to manually
download all the packages required by dependency and ran `dpkg -i
foo.deb baz.deb' and all troubles came as a result.
I tried to upgrade perl5.6, xfree86-4, mozilla-0.8.1, and netscape-4.76,
all gave me frustrating experience. Luckily, I worked around the problem
of updating xfree86-4 by reinstall the Debian/GNU system without
packages that might conflict with xfree86-4. Yes, that's quite
expensive. I'm not so lucky with perl5.6, because of circular dependency
between perl and debconf. I have to compile perl5.6.1 myself and install
it to /usr/local. When I attempted to upgrade mozilla-M18_3 to
mozilla-0.8.1 and failed, I made another attempt to install
netscape-4.76 and found that failed as well. Now the system was left
with some libraries in a mess.
I really hate the circular dependency in Debian packages. That's really
frustrating and time-consuming and can render the system in disorder.
Has anybody run into the same problem?
Is there a good way to avoid this?
Suggestions and advice are welcome!
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