I appear to be getting a recurring dependency, how do I fix this?

Question

I am trying to install make - normally I just type sudo apt-get install make and it works, but on this server I am getting the following;

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
git-core: Depends: libdigest-sha1-perl but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: rcs but it is not going to be installed

Firstly, I don't fully understand what git-core has to do with anything, but for now I just want make to work so I ploughed on by running apt-get -f install but this fails for the same reason.

So I tried to install libdigest-sha1-perl, it fails because rcs is needed. So I go to install rcs and guess why it fails? Yup libdigest-sha1-perl is needed.

I have never come across this before and any pointers on how to achieve this would be greatly received.

The machine is running Debian 5.0.9 if that makes any odds.

Answer 1

git-core doesn't have anything to do with make, but you are going to get this error for whatever you try to install - apt-get won't proceed if some dependencies are broken.

Try something of the following:

• try to reinstall git-core:
  apt-get remove git-core
apt-get update
apt-get install git-core Not sure about Debian 5, but since Debian 6 git-core is obsolete, so you should be installing package named git for the git version control system.
• or download make and install it with dpkg;