Re: Reinstalling Perl

[Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org>]

On Mon, May 14, 2001 at 04:38:04PM -0500, Stephen E. Hargrove wrote:
>I recently manually installed perl 5.6.1.  Since then, apt-get has been
>kicking and screaming.  First it was extremely unhappy with @INC, and once
>I got that corrected, it complains bitterly as follows:

[snip]
>I need to back out of this pretty quick.  I'm thinking the fastest way to
>correct the problem would be to:
>
>1) uninstall the manual perl (5.6.1) installation

The standard perl install creates a .packlist file in the archlib
directory with a list of all the files installed.  You can use:

  perl -V:archlib

to determine the path to that directory.

>2) $ dpkg --get-selections | grep -v deinstall | grep perl \
>| cut -s -f1 > perl-file
>3) force a purge on all perl-related .debs appearing in perl-file
>4) $ dpkg --set-selections < perl-file
>5) $ apt-get update
>6) $ apt-get dist-upgrade
[snip]

After removing the 5.6.1 stuff, you could try this:

  dpkg --purge --force-depends --force-remove-essential \
      libcgi-fast-perl libperl-dev perl-debug perl-doc perl-suid \
      perl-modules perl libperl5.6 perl-base

to clean out any remenants of the 5.6.0 packages.

Then fetch the perl-base deb manually and install with dpkg -i (note
that this assumes i386, other archs are slightly different, you need
libperl5.6 as well):

  wget http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/p/perl/perl-base_5.6.0-21_i386.deb
  dpkg -i perl-base_5.6.0-21_i386.deb

Once you have the base package installed, you should then be able to use
apt to install whatever other components you require:

  apt-get install perl perl-doc

You may need also need to do:

  apt-get -f install

Regards,
-- 
Brendan O'Dea                                        bod@compusol.com.au
Compusol Pty. Limited                  (NSW, Australia)  +61 2 9810 3633