Re: apt wickened up: Unable to purge package gdm2 !
michaw <Michael.Wordehoff@gmx.de> writes:
> I upgraded to Gnome2 for woody on i386 and decided at one point to
> purge gdm2. Well there was this warning 'directory /etc/gdm/<some>
> not empty so not removed', leaving it half-configured.
There are several states a package can be in. "Half-configured" is, I
believe, a technical term; at this point, though, gdm2 would be in the
"only config files left" state. In particular, dpkg remembers that
gdm2 still has /etc/gdm/gdm.conf and what not around.
> Since i suspect Gnome to be still to be sensible with obsolet
> configs i just removed /etc/gdm completely by hand. I thought that
> a complete 'purge' would left no remainders, so why problems with
> that if I know I don't need the configs anymore ??
The right way to do this would have been with 'dpkg --purge gdm2'.
dpkg considers "package has a config file, but the administrator
deleted it" to be a valid state, and will try hard to preserve this.
> Now i decided to install the 'old' gdm instead ( I refer to as gdm1 now),
> purged gdm2 again just to see what it says now.
> Now, this second 'purge' still left the package 'half-configured' !
> With an error message shown from subprocess dpkg:
>
> Error Code(1) while processing gdm2, unable to access the archive -- file not
> found ( please note: i translate from german what i understood was the
> meaning here ).
So when you say "purge" here, do you mean "removed by hand everything
in /etc/gdm" or "dpkg --purge" (or an equivalent APT invocation)? I
suspect having the actual error message here would help too.
> So i looked upt that script, and then compared the files in /etc/gdm to
> /var/lib/dpkg/info/gdm{1,2}. With gdm1 installed (aptitude) (!) I noticed
> two *mysterious* circumstances there:
>
> /etc/gdm ( which never got removed at all ) is empty.
> No sessions, gdm.conf.... thus the installation went totally wrong, but from
> aptitude is shown up successful !
Right, probably what's going on here is that dpkg still thinks gdm2
should own those config files, and that you intentionally deleted
them, so even if you try to install gdm1 (with the same config file),
dpkg will helpfully delete it for you.
> On the other hand, can the apt-database get corrupted using aptitude
> ?
I haven't had any issues. My only complaint is that if you 'apt-get
install' something, aptitude doesn't recognize its dependencies as
automatically installed, but you can 'aptitude install' just as easily.
> And still i can't get it: purging should be possible anyway ?
Should just work. '_' (underscore) in aptitude or dselect.
Maybe you could say a bit more about what happens when you try to
install the GNOME 1 gdm using APT or dpkg?
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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