[Gllug] Stop apt-get fretting about packages installed by force

[Martin A. Brooks]

Tet wrote:
>> Installing .debs from other distros _will_ screw up your system.
> 
> Yaaay! Finally, debian bigots 

Advocates, please, my views regarding Debian are not "unquestionably 
correct".

have had to admit that RPM "dependency
> hell" problems are not an inherent fault in RPM, but an artifact of
> mixing packages from different sources, and that .debs suffer from
> *exactly* the same problems.

RPMDH is exacerbated by the lack of "official" packages.  People using 
RPM distros often make the fatal error of mixing RPMs from different 
sources because their $vendor doesn't supply one.

This is not a Redhat vs Debian problem, or Debian vs anything else, it's 
simply misguided use of whatever package system you're using.

Debian helps here because there's very little OSS commonly, and 
uncommonly, used that isn't there available already.  A quick check of 
my local server suggests I have 16,865 programs all ready and waiting to 
be installed, just an "apt-get install" away.

On top of that I know that every single one of these programs has been 
rigorously tested.  Who can tell me about the provenance of 
$random_application-1.0-i386.rpm that I downloaded from megarpms.cx ?

More recently, Debian has the problem of Ubuntu.  Or more accurately 
Ubuntu users not realising that they don't have Debian.  Ubuntu and it's 
army of offshoots and clones have already made themselves incompatible 
with mainstream Debian yet the users wonder why we can't help.  Cruel it 
may be, but the following exchange is frequently seen on freenode's #debian:

<user> please can you help me with $application.  I'm using Ubuntu 
Pointless Penguin
<debuser> this is #debian, please join #ubuntu and ask there
<user> but Ubuntu is like Debian! It's based on Debian!
*debuser replaces user's oxygen supply with ozone
<debuser> It's like oxygen! It's based on oxygen!

Passionate I am, bigoted I most certainly am not.  Show me something 
that works better than Debian and I'll be as near to the front of the 
queue as possible to get it.

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