For various reasons, I'm running some Debian systems with, shall we say, odd sets of packages installed. It's becoming almost impossible to do apt-get install to install anything; apt is always complaining that A depends on B, but it is not going to be installed, or that C is broken, or something like that.
My question is, what's a good way to damn the torpedoes and go full speed ahead, installing the package's contents anyway? I know some partial techniques, but they're not always sufficient:
If the
.debfile has been downloaded, I could find it in/var/cache/aptand install it by hand withdpkg -i, although I suspect even there I might be stymied (the install might fail) due to unmet dependencies.I think there's a way to extract the contents of a
.debfile by hand, although I can never remember it, and I'm pretty sure it's strongly discouraged, for the usual sorts of reasons.I know I can theoretically use various techniques (e.g.
equivs) to create some kind of a pseudo-package, but this seems like a lot of trouble.
Are there any other options? Does apt-get have an "ignore dependencies" switch that I've missed? I've seen references to --nodeps and --no-depsoptions, butapt` (at least on this system) doesn't seem to support them.
Or, side question, is there a way to force apt to at least download the .deb file, even when it knows it won't be able to install it? (I've been trying to use apt-get -d install, but it doesn't seem to be downloading anything.)
I've seen the previous question Ignore all dependencies for a specific package with apt-get, and it contains some answers, but I'm still searching for a better one.
[Footnote: No need to lecture me on what a bad idea this is, and that I shouldn't be trying to do it. I already know that. :-) ]
