overcoming apt's resistance to broken packages

[Mike McClain <mike.junk@nethere.com>]

    I don't need xserver-xorg-video-mach64 or xserver-xorg-video-r128
to run X on my machine but xserver-xorg-video-radeon comes bundled with
them and xserver-xorg-video-ati. A little experimentation established
that X works fine without xserver-xorg-video-{mach64,r128} but apt-get
complains about the broken ...-ati package and refuses to do anything
else.
    I've read the manpages  and while dpkg seems to have
'--force-depends' and '--ignore-depends' options I can't see anything
in the apt-get or apt.conf manpages that really helps and putting
each of those two options in the DPkg section of /etc/apt/apt.conf
did no good.
    Google results tell how to recover from missing dependancies but I
didn't see any discussion about getting apt to ignore them.
Thanks,
Mike
--
"The only way that problems get solved in real life is with a lot of
hard work on getting the details right."
    - Linus Torvalds