Yes I remember RPM hell from my Slackware/SuSE days. "Package A needs packages B and C". Ok, go and get packages B and C. "Package B needs packages D and E. Package C needs packages F and G". It's bad enough having o hunt around for the correct versions, but when some of them are only available as source, I give up. I don't expect to have to install a development environment and compile software just so I can install a new mail client.
I think a lot of these problems have been resolved with distros which have a dedicated package database. I'm talking about distros like Fedora, Ubuntu, and even Debian. Their packages are tailored to the distro, they're all pre-compiled, and the package managers recorsively resolve the dependencies.
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moto