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"apt" packages are handmade. And they depend on hand-made dependencies. It becomes increasingly difficult to maintain packages like chromium, because they have too many dependencies, that have to be packaged individually.

The "universe" repository has tens of thousands of packages. Do you know that a majority of them are not maintained because it is too much effort and not many helping hands?

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So we have an automation problem. Building packages is needlessly inconvenient and the few hands we have are overwhelmed by the number of packages that need maintaining.

And we "solve" it by allowing the inclusion of different, incompatible, versions of packages into even bigger packages. Sorry, but that's not a solution. It's the technical debt equivalent to payday lenders.

Do not pretend that "apt" (.deb) packages require un-bundling dependencies. That's just policy decision of Debian. You could just create Chrome package and put everything in /opt/google-chrome or whatever root path you choose. Ubuntu could have lifted this policy.

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