RE: backports dist-upgrade issue (udev breaks consolekit) : a possible solution ?
Hi Micha,
Thanks for your answer.
Yes I tried an "aptitude upgrade" that alas ended up with a segmentation
fault after downloading a lot of stuff.
I understand the solution I found is absolutely inappropriate for production
environments and you are right to point this out, I should have accompanied
my message with a lot of warnings. To tell the truth, I do not feel really
confident in my current packet manager state !
I just wanted to bring some additional information about this issue after
trying experimental things on an experimental system...
I'll keep you informed if something goes weird.
Christian.
-----Message d'origine-----
De : Micha Lenk [mailto:micha@debian.org]
Envoyé : jeudi 8 mai 2014 13:53
À : Christian Vigh; olivier.langella@moulon.inra.fr
Cc : debian-backports@lists.debian.org
Objet : Re: backports dist-upgrade issue (udev breaks consolekit) : a
possible solution ?
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
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