Re: dpkg/apt-get madness

["Helge Hafting" <helge.hafting@daldata.no>]

In <[🔎] 199811021610.RAA08914@sg10.chem.tue.nl>, on 11/02/98 
   at 05:10 PM, "E.L. Meijer \(Eric\)" <tgakem@sg10.chem.tue.nl> said:

>I seemed to remember that the X11 maintainer specifically mailed to this
>list that the slink X packages were severely broken and only to be used
>by brave peoply meaning to help with the debugging process.
Ok.  I'll reinstall X from the CD then.  No problem with that.

>I also had lots of trouble with the emacs20 package on hamm.  Some people
>suggested to remove the `tm' package.  This worked on certain systems,
>but on other systems there was no `tm' present at all.  I got this sorted
I'll try removing this "tm" thing, but what if it doesn't work?   I can
list the contents of the emacs20 package and remove files by hand, but how
to I make the package management system believe that package emacs20 no
longer exist?  I don't want apt-get/dpkg to fail forever trying to deal
with  it.   

I have no problems with dubious software in the unstable tree, but this
looks like a problem in the package management system itself.  Unable to
even remove a package (that nothing depends on anymore) because of a "very
bad  inconsistent state?"   

Helge Hafting