Giannis Stoilis wrote:
Hello,
I have a broken debian package from a third party vendor which I want
to uninstall from a debian sarge system.
Unfortunately, the package demands to run a buggy script prior to
uninstalling, which always fails, thus blocking the uninstallation
procedure.
I want to remove this package completely from the package manager's
database without caring whether its prerm script fails, no matter the
consequenses. I could remove each file from the package by hand, but
that still leaves me with a corrupted dpkg database, blocking me from
using the package manager.
Using "dpkg -r --force-all" doesn't seem to do the trick.
Is there another way to force an uninstallation of a broken package?
Is there a solution I am missing? Could you point me in the right
direction as to what to do? Any help will be greatly appreciated.
There's more than one solution:
For the first one, we need to know which script is failing, why, and
try to fix it (no good).
To do it you should send the output when you try you uninstall the
package.
For the second one, you can use dpkg --get-selection and dpkg
--set-selections for rebuilding de dpkg database.
First, you do
dpkg --get-selections > selections.txt
then you edit selections.txt and delete the line containing this
package. And then you do:
dpkg --set-selections < selections.txt
Then you just delete the files installed by the package and the
package itself.
I don't really know if it works since I never did it, but in theory it
should.