Re: removing badly-broken package

[Stefan.Ehlen@saw.rwth-aachen.de]

Hi,

 in message <[🔎] 19990726193642.A984@bob> you wrote:
 
>After a recent upgrade of some potato packages, xcontrib is in a very
>broken state where I can neither upgrade nor remove it. 
>
>dpkg reports:
>
>$ dpkg -l xcontrib
>Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
>| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
>|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad
>)
>||/ Name            Version        Description
>+++-===============-==============-===========================================
>=
>pHR xcontrib        3.3.2-5.1      XFree contributed clients.
>
>Trying to upgrade causes the post-removal script to do something which
>grabs all the memory and swap in my computer and ends up segfaulting. 
>dpkg --force-remove-reinstrq also makes this happen.  
>
>There must be some way to manually remove all traces of xcontrib and try
>installing it again, but I haven't found any mention of how to
>accomplish this.  Can someone please point me in the right direction? 

I manually uninstalled several packages using the information in 
/var/lib/dpkg/info. I deleted all files in <package>.list and had a closer 
look at the other <package>.* files to see whether there was more to do - in 
most cases there wasn't. 

Oh, by the way, it worked every time :-)

Good luck!

CU
Stefan