Hello,
I am trying to get my head around this dependency thing. Quite often it seems like I am caught in a catch 22.
Where trying to update something will require other libraries but when you try to install them they conflcit when current libraries. I´ll describe my current situation for a clearer picture.

I´ve got some beta install (apparently) of amaroK that I want to upgrade. Currently I have amarok 1.3beta2-3 and I just downloaded amarok-1.3.0_0.3-1 which I believe is newer as it requires some other newer libraries than I currently have installed.
This new version of amaroK requires gstreamer-0.8.9 or greater but I only have gstreamer-0.8.1-7.1 installed.
Then when I try and install the 0.8.9 gstreamer it conflicts with my currently installed gstreamer. Then I try and uninstall my current one. But that fails as other libraries depend on it.

How do you generally solve something like this? I find myself running into these kinds of loops quite often. As I am completly new to linux I haven´t yet grasped how to deal with issues like this..

I am running suse 9.2 with KDE 3.4 and these libraries haven´t yet showed up on any yast-source so I am trying to do it the manual way. I hope I was clear enough for you to get what I am trying to do.

Thanks for any help!

I've been using SuSE for about 3 years now. I had similar problems. UNTIL I installed apt4rpm (acutally apt-get for rpm, not the server version apt4rpm).

To solve your problem, you need to install the new package, then make a whole bunch of sym-links to non-existant files with the correct names, in the correct locations. What this means, because of backwards compatilibity, you can use the new files but not the new capabilities of them.

With apt-get (for rpm), when you log onto the internet, and run 'apt-get upgrade' to get the list of the latest packages from a repository appropiate to your distro, then run 'apt-get install <packagename>', apt-get takes care of the dependencies for you, upgrading packages as required, installing new packages as required, and removing packages as required.

Apt-get is very good about giving you options on how to handle a problem.

All praise to the good folks at Debian for apt-get, and the good folks at Connectiva for the port to rpm (hope I got the credits correctly).

Makes my peepee tingle just thinking of what I can do with SuSE via apt-get for rpm.

oh this sounds interesting. Will have a closer look at this apt-get thing. I thought this was why YaST was there though?

Thanks for the help!