"Unofficial packages" aren't really in the set of supported dpkg use cases. They're a hack that fail in the general case because there are various things they c

"Unofficial packages" aren't really in the set of supported dpkg use cases. They're a hack that fail in the general case because there are various things they can't express because the expression of them comes from the other side of the package relationship (eg. Breaks/Replaces), and official packages don't declare such things for packages outside the Debian archive. Therefore external packages are fundamentally broken, but third parties keep using them because better alternatives haven't existed in the past. > Wouldn't it be neat if such an atrocity wasn't possible? An easier way might be to make it difficult for users to install "unofficial packages", but that would be against the philosophy of users having ultimate control over their systems. Your suggestion puts us in the rather interesting situation that you're requesting a new feature for something that primarily affects third party packages that aren't actually supported in the first place.