Bug#903295: libpam-systemd: Depends: systemd-shim (>= 10-4~) but it is not going to be installed: A stopgap, probably incorrect solution

[Wyatt Ward <wyattfward@gmail.com>]

This is probably not a good solution, but as a stopgap measure for anyone who finds this bug report via google, one can install 'dpkg-dev' and 'devscripts', and then do the following in an empty directory (assuming they have the debian source packages in their sources.list):

apt-get source systemd-shim

cd systemd-shim-10

debchange --increment

dpkg-buildpackage -uc -us -b

cd ../

This will create a new .deb package which is identical to 10-3, except it will identify itself as 10-4.

The primary issue here is that actual things that could have changed between debian's revision 3 and revision 4 of systemd 10 (if any) won't be accounted for, and it will prevent a normal 'apt-get upgrade' from installing systemd-shim 10-4 from the debian repositories, should it ever become available.

apt-get install --reinstall systemd-shim would obviate that last problem, but would have to be done manually, which requires remembering to do it in the future.

I did this, just to prevent apt from completely trashing some of my SW that has a systemd dependency, but please only do this if you know what you are doing.