I personally am perfectly happy to install a bunch of extra packages, when necessary, to get things to work. Especially now when we have groovy tools like apt and yum to solve and download all the dependencies for us.
I'm not, the distro's core package management should take care of this. Debian and Gentoo both do (though I'm not a fan of waiting for things to compile).
dpkg doesn't take care of the dependency resolution any more than rpm does. It is apt that does the magic. And yum comes as default on RH/FC. It is almost as good as apt. Apt is very easy to install if you want it. Or you could use Smart... Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com