Re: dpkg and debiandoc-sgml rebuild
Jean-Paul Blaquiere <japester@ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au> wrote:
> I had a drive crash recently and various program have become
> corrupted. Including *sigh* dpkg. It segfaults when installing new
> packages. but, that the background
> to try and fix this I have 'apt-get source dpkg' and tried to build
> it. It complains late in the compile about debiandoc-sgml not
> existing, so I 'apt-get source debiandoc-sgml' and tried to build
> this now the problem.
This won't help you with your problem, because after building dpkg
and/or debiandoc-sgml, you will have to install them and this won't be
possible, because you need an installed dpkg for this...
> during the build process for the sgml stuff, it used dpkg-gencontrol
> to obtain the architecture of the current platform. and that is
> segfaulting too.
> What I am wondering is why do these two packages depend on each
> other? and, how can I get around it?
This is the classical hen and egg problem. dpkg is one of the central
programs in Debian, so every package needs dpkg to compile. You will
run into the same problem with gcc.
If you don't want to reinstall your system, you may try to install the
dpkg binary package without using dpkg. A deb file, is nothing else
bug an ar(1) archive, so you can decompress it using "ar x". After
this, you will have tree files (debian-binary, control.tar.gz, and
data.tar.gz) in your current directory. cd to / and run
"tar xvfz /tmp/data.tar.gz". After this, you should have a working
dpkg installed. Now you should try to reinstall the package using the
dpkg(1) binary (to make this installation official to the dpkg
database).
Tschoeeee
Roland
--
* roland@spinnaker.de * http://www.spinnaker.de/ *
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