Published October 31 2025 on MentalNet.xyz
Every developer dreams of clean installs, smooth dependency trees, and stable builds — until one day, apt decides to summon the flames of dependency hell. That’s when you realize the real bug isn’t in the system — it’s in your assumptions.
This is the story of a looping dpkg install — and the realization that sometimes the only way out of dependency hell is to look in the mirror and ask, “What did I make, and how did I mess up?”
It began with a metapackage called live-update, meant to pull in the latest components of my system. It depended on small helper packages — things like mysql-binlog-cfg and proxyconfig — which only ran setup scripts. They didn’t install any files.
dpkg saw that and said, “Well, you installed nothing, so you don’t exist.” Then apt tried to reinstall them, forever. A perfect feedback loop of install → vanish → reinstall → vanish. It wasn’t broken — it was just doing exactly what I told it to do.
The moment of truth comes when you stop blaming apt and start realizing you built the dependency furnace yourself. The fix was surprisingly humble: drop a tiny marker file like /usr/share/mysql-binlog-cfg/marker.txt. Suddenly, dpkg has something real to hold onto.
But it also made me think about how easily we build fragile systems just because we don’t fully understand what’s under the hood. We stack abstractions until we forget what we’re orchestrating.
Modern development culture tries to avoid these lessons. Everything gets containerized, abstracted, and outsourced to layers that promise safety. But abstraction without understanding is just dependency hell waiting for a trigger.
When you face problems like this, you learn more than you ever could hiding behind a container runtime. You start designing systems that leverage their foundation instead of avoiding it. That’s what makes an ecosystem strong — not escaping the heat, but learning to harness it.
So yeah — I’ll take dependency hell any day over blind abstraction. Because when you finally stare into the dpkg logs and see what’s actually happening, you gain something most engineers never do: understanding. Real control. And a bit of pride in the flames you tamed.
Bring it on, APT.