Re: severely broken dpkg (among other things)

["John H. Robinson, IV" <jhriv@ucsd.edu>]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2001 at 11:35:58PM -0600, Sam TH wrote:
> 
> I am entirely unable to discover what file it is reffering to.

have you run fsck on the affected filesystems?
have you tried running strace with dpkg?

$ sudo strace dpkg -i <package>

this is a weird problem. perhaps shared libs problems? do any other apps
have problems, like ldconfig? [1]

have you tried checking the binaries against the md5sums in
/var/lib/dpkg/info[2]?
$ md5sum -vc /var/lib/dpkg/info/<package>.md5sums
$ cat /var/lib/dpkg/info/*.md5sums | md5sum -vc

-john

[1] this is when i get to plug my favourite emergency tool: sash, the
stand alone shell. when nothing else works, sash will, because it is
statically linked, and it includes a lot of builtins. great for when
shared libs go away.

[2] yes yes yes i know i know. md5sums are far from foolproof. if it is
good, it tells you nothing - but if it fails, then you have reasonable
suspicion to investigate the situation further..