Re: How to get rid of orphaned data in package database?

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

"Hans-J. Ullrich" <hans.ullrich@loop.de> writes:

> Hello all, 
>
> although this is nor causing much problems, I wonder, that in my database are 
> a lot of packages, which are no more in the repository (for example, all 
> ia32-*-libs from the time, where ia32-apt-get was active).
>
> Is there a way, to get this cleaned? Those packages are no more available!

The last versions of ia32-apt-get added a "Provides: ai32-abi" to all
converted packages. If you had a new enough ia32-apt-get installed
then you can easily grep for that Provides in dpkgs status file.

Saddly ia32-libs fails to conflict with ia32-abi and instead conflicts
with a selection of individual packages (only those in ia32-libs).
But you could build a dummy deb with equivs that conflicts ia32-abi,
install that and remove it again.

Or remove libc6-i386 and then reinstall whatever 32bit stuff you use.

> There is another thing, which I discovered: apt-file is showing still 
> /emul/ia32-linux entries, although the packages are no more installed to /emul 
> .

Outdated Contents file?

MfG
        Goswin