Hi Christian, On 08.05.2014 11:49, Christian Vigh wrote:
[...] 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.
Did you try to use aptitude for the upgrade (e.g. 'aptitude upgrade')? In my experience aptitude does a much better job resolving dependencies in complicated upgrade situations.
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)
While Byron Clark's advice was appropriate for the issue that he replies to (a really broken dpkg status file), it is just a really bad advice to solve a simple dependency issue. Please don't do that, and please don't recommend that to others again. It may make your packet management database inconsistent with what is actually installed on your system. And having done so, you cannot trust the packet manager anymore to install/remove the right files on upgrade. In the end now installed software might misbehave because of missing, outdated or expected to be deleted files.
Best regards, Micha Lenk