Question about failed dependencies.

[Ice-9]

Say I want to install package A and it has failed dependencies, it needs to have updated packages B,C and D to work.
I download the rpm's, rpm -Uvh them and I'm incredibly lucky, package A installs fine ....

Now, I just upgraded packages B,C and D from my system, is there any chance that a previously installed program wouldn't work anymore because it needs the "older" versions of these packages or is it always safe to resolve dependency errors regardless of the packages you install/upgrade?

[KernelPanic]

If you were going to break something it tends to tell you:

eg
foo depends libbar.so.6
or something like that.
It should be fine.

[Ice-9]

But everything is not available through apt-get ...

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by Ice9:
Now, I just upgraded packages B,C and D from my system, is there any chance that a previously installed program wouldn't work anymore because it needs the "older" versions of these packages or is it always safe to resolve dependency errors regardless of the packages you install/upgrade?

No, it upgrading a package will break a dependency of other installed programs it will tell you. At least that's the way it's supposed to work if the RPMs are built properly. I have never had a case of upgrading an RPM breaking other installed packages without warning me of it, and I've been doing this for a long time now...