On Tue, 2010-06-29 at 21:58 +0100, Pedro Lopes wrote:
P.S. this sounds similar to the old "dll hell" of Windows, which they
"solved" with the glorious >[sarchasm intended] winsxs folder which grows and grows to as much as 15GB of mostly duplicate >dll's..... I know what you mean, I remember my first years at college trying to develop 3d apps in Win. At getting Visual Studio complaining about one million dlls... solution was usually a brute force copy paste of a dozen dlls to weird system locations =P
Not trying to be a linux-fan-boy, I've used win my entire life and hated those dll mess-ups. In linux there's many possibilities for solving dependency issues, learning to use aptitude seems important - im still learning it - as far as your issue:
There is a simple way to avoid such dependency nightmares in ubuntu: Just don't try to install a jaunty package on lucid.
Often it's not a big thing doing that, but the pd-extended package has lots of dependencies and many of them are somehow media related (decoder/encoders, openGL etc.) and I found that those are changing versions more rapidly than others and often have a much more delicate dependency structure. So Pd-extended is sometimes specially hard to install in something else than its targeted distro.
@ ttf-stream-vera dependency problem: IIRC, the vera font was abandoned in ubuntu once and got replaced by dejavu, but don't ask me about the details.
If you like to do install a package from a local deb file (instead from repository with aptitude) and still want all the dependencies to be handled automatically, there is the gdebi tool (and it's gdebi-gtk GUI equivalent).
Always a good place to look for Pd-extended packaged for a certain distro is http://autobuild.puredata.info. But beware, those might be not yet released versions. However, I personally found using beta version targeted at the correct distro often much less hassling than using released versions for old distros.
Roman