On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 18:04 +1100, Steven McDonald wrote:

> That said, you can override dependencies with dpkg if you really want
> to, like this:
> 
> cd /var/cache/apt/archives/
> sudo dpkg -i --force-depends mondo*.deb
> 
> It's probably best to tab-complete the package name rather than
> globbing it, as it's possible you'll have multiple versions of a
> particular package in /var/cache/apt/archives/. It's also probably not
> the best of ideas to be doing this on a production server --
> dependencies exist for a reason. 

I know you recommended not to do it, but I wouldn't have even mentioned
the possibility.

There's one semi good reason that I know of to use force-deps on 
a working system, it's otherwise there for emergencies like 
a broken dpkg database. 

Occasionally you might use it to purge a package temporarily, 
and reinstall it straight away, if the package has other packages
depending on it, and you don't want to purge them too. 

In the old days, it was standard to see instructions using no-deps on
rpm based systems, and it caused a lot of pain. Basically once you've
used no-deps once, you have to use it every time.

> The alternative is to try to build the
> package yourself from source:
> 
> sudo apt-get build-dep mondo
> apt-get -b source mondo
> sudo dpkg -i mondo*.deb

Yeah, that's one way, or look around in backports or ppa repositories.
If you back port it yourself, it's up to you to keep it updated, if you
can find it in a ppa or backport repository, someone else will do it
for you (you hope).


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