Package Dependencies

Packages very rarely work by themselves, they are most often accompanied by dependencies to help them run. For example, let's say we have a group of restaurants, these restaurants all make different cuisine, however they all get their ingredients from the same farm. Their food is dependent on the farm's supplies, if the farm were to suddenly stop supplying food, well then the restaurants would be in a pretty bad state.

In Linux, these dependencies are often other packages or shared libraries. Shared libraries are libraries of code that other programs want to use and don't want to have to rewrite for themselves. Think of the restaurant again, how much work would it be if every restaurant also farmed their own food? Too much.

We will dig more into shared libraries in the filesystem course, so for now just remember that packages have dependencies to help them run, whether those dependencies are other packages or libraries, if the dependencies aren't there the package will end up in a broken state and most of the time not even install.