Re: Bug#540939: upgrade has broken several packages: gcj-4.4-jre-headless cannot be configured

[Matthias Klose <doko@debian.org>]

On 10.08.2009 23:55, Graham Cobb wrote:
> Package: gcj-4.4-jre-headless
> Version: 4.4.1-1
> Severity: important
>
> Doing 'aptitude safe-upgrade' on my squeeze system has resulted in
> gcj-4.4-jre-headless being unable to be configured.  The aptitude error is:
>
> Setting up gcj-4.4-jre-headless (4.4.1-1) ...
> update-alternatives: error: alternative rmiregistry can't be master: it is a slave of java
> dpkg: error processing gcj-4.4-jre-headless (--configure):
>   subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
>
> This problem then causes several other packages to not be configurable
> because they have dependency on gcj-4.4-jre-headless.
>
> These broken packages are causing other problems and I cannot remove them
> without uninstalling important packages like openoffice.

the recent dpkg doesn't allow mixed master/slave alternatives anymore. Not sure 
how dpkg deals with this when a user has such packages installed, and then 
upgrades to the new dpkg.

the only "fix" I can think of would be adding conflicts to every package listing 
rmiregistry et al as a slave alternative. But I don't know these packages, so 
it's likely that we close this report as a won't fix.

  Matthias