Broken dependencies in universe

[Daniel Robitaille]

> It seems more logical to me that if a package does not exist in Ubuntu
> universe, every application that depends on that package should not be
> in universe either.  Having broken packages in the repository just
> seems tacky and worse than not having the packages available at all.
> Or is there a reason I'm not aware of why broken packages have a
> reason to exist in the repository?

my understanding is that universe is done more or less without human
intervention.  So something could easily be broken, and nobody would really
notice, unless they try to install it.  That's the sad reality of
trying to use the non-supported universe in Ubuntu.

Some hints of what's broken or missing could possibly be found in the build
logs:  http://people.ubuntu.com/~lamont/buildLogs/
But I can't seem to find anything about php4-common in there.