In general it is not a good idea to run production software from HEAD unless you know what you are doing (and it is still probably a bad idea unless you are using one of the more modern source control packages and you are a bulldog).
I had a similar experience once trying to get something very new running on an old version of Red Hat box. I got dependency spaghetti all over myself and ended up bleaching the Red Hat right out of that machine (I heart Debian: apt-get rocks).
I asked Hamilton to help remove unneeded dependancies in dotlrn-attendance (I would like to get attendance compatible with oacs-5-2 and why it would need dotlrn-ecommerece is a mystery to me). I hope Hamilton can help us out here (and you have some bulldog in you and are willing to eventually try again).
