Installing software the Debian way
Apt Mastery
© Galyna Andrushko, 123RF
Dependency tangles fall away with the Debian package system.
Rarely do you hear about "dependency hell" any more, the term used when the installation of an application failed because it needed a development library that wasn't installed and when each library installed could thrust you further into a proliferation of non-installed libraries, leaving you a whimpering mass of frustration.
Fortunately, this scenario is largely a thing of the past, thanks to the Debian dpkg and apt-get package system. More than a decade ago, Debian developers hit on the idea of installing software arranged in packages of files that included scripts to grab missing libraries automatically and configure the software. The idea was eventually copied by other package systems, so now you generally encounter dependency hell only when trying to install unpackaged applications still in development.
The Debian package system is used by many of the most popular GNU/Linux distributions. Technically, dpkg is the tool that manages the software, and apt-get is the tool through which users interact with dpkg most of the time. Both are used to install software in the online repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list.
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