Re: backports dist-upgrade issue (udev breaks consolekit) : a possible solution ?

["Christian Vigh" <christian.vigh@orange.fr>]

Hi everybody,

I have had a similar issue a few days ago on my personal dedicated server,
after an upgrade.

It was the reverse of yours ; after an apt-get ugrade, I had the following
error :

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 consolekit : Breaks: udev (< 204-10) but 175-?? is installed. 

And trying to install udev 204 on my system issued a lots of warnings saying
that this version of udev was not compatible with my system and would break
it.

Apparently, a new version of consolekit or systemd broke some dependencies
or forced the inscription of new wrong ones (well, I'm not really a
specialist of apt and dpkg).

Every run of apt-get kept trying to reinstall udev 204, failing at the end.
And every upgrade complained about the broken dependency cited above.

With the great help of this post from Byron Clark
(http://uug.byu.edu/pipermail/uug-list/2009-October/002922.html), I
discovered the existence of the /var/backups directory, which contains
previous versions of dpkg databases ; so here is what I did :

1) I removed the consolekit package :
	# aptitude remove consolekit
   (note that apt-get remove did not succeed on my system)
2) I unzipped the very last version of the dpkg status file :
	# cd /var/backups
	# gzip -d dpkg.status.2.gz
    (you have to look at the creation time of the dpkg.status.*.gz to find
the appropriate one, ie the one that was correct before the problem
occurred)
3) I copied the older version of the status file to the dpkg directory :
	# cp dpkg.status.2 /var/lib/dpkg/status
   (replace ".2" with the sequence number of your last correct status file)
4) I did an update/upgrade :
	# apt-get update
	# apt-get upgrade

Apt-get upgrade issued a lot of warnings about missing files in packages,
concluding that the package may be already installed (sorry I did not note
the exact message and don't know if it can be found somewhere in a log...).

But everything seemed to work fine.

So the problem was solved ; to get sure, I rebooted and did again an apt-get
update/upgrade. There was no more message complaining about the broken
dependency.

Please note however that, although I installed gnome on this system, I am
not yet able to check if it's in ok state, since I haven't yet configured an
X-Server on the Windows PC I'm using to access my remote Unix one.

Anyway, my problem was solved ; hope this will help to solve yours...

With kind regards,
Christian.