CodeSOD: Should I Do this? Depends.

One of the key differences between a true WTF and an ugly hack is a degree of self-awareness. It's not a WTF if you know it's a WTF. If you've been doing this job for a non-zero amount of time, you have had a moment where you have a solution, and you know it's wrong, you know you shouldn't do this, but by the gods, it works and you've got more important stuff to worry about right now, so you just do it.

An anonymous submitter committed a sin, and has reached out to us for absolution.

This is a case of "DevOps" hackery. They have one server with no Internet- one remote server with no Internet. Deploying software to a server you can't access physically or through the Internet is a challenge. They have a solution involving hopping through some other servers and bridging the network that lets them get the .deb package files within reach of the destination server.

But that introduces a new problem: these packages have complex dependency chains and unless they're installed in the right order, it won't work. The correct solution would be to install a local package repository on the destination server, and let apt worry about resolving those dependencies.

And in the long run, that's what our anonymous submitter promises to do. But they found themselves in a situation where they had more important things to worry about, and just needed to do it.

#!/bin/bashcount=0for f in ./*.debdoecho "Attempt $count"for file in ./*.debdo echo "Installing $file" sudo dpkg -i $filedone(( count++ ))done

This is a solution to dependency management which operates on O(N^2): we install each package once for the total number of packages in the folder. It's the brutest of force solutions, and no matter what our dependency chain looks like, by sheer process of elimination, this will eventually get every package installed. Eventually.

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