All together now
It’s a Saturday in the early ’90s, Solaris 2 is less than a year old, and this pilot fish sysadmin at a company running it on about 25 machines is having his monthly Solaris patching party. Attendees: one fish.
Fish is cautious and paranoid, good qualities in a newbie sysadmin, so he always patches one of the less important machines first, just in case something crazy happens. On this particular Saturday, something does.
He has three packages to add. The first won’t install because it requires that another package be installed first. Perfectly normal. But when he tries to install that required package, he finds that it too requires that another package be installed first. OK, no biggie. There were three packages to add, and fish just got hold of the task by the wrong end. Unless, of course, that final package requires that the first package be installed before it can be installed. Which is, indeed the case: an infinite loop.