Re: corrupted dpkg?

[Kent West <westk@acu.edu>]

Sridhar Srinivasan wrote:

> Kent West wrote:
>
> > I'm no expert, but what I'd try is to find the mozilla-xft.deb and 
> > liblocal-gettext....deb files, perhaps in /var/cache/apt/archives, 
> > and try installing them manually with "dpkg -i libloc....deb".
> I tried that for other files. Results in the following. The same error 
> occurs no matter which package I try to install. I think i need to go 
> into some file and either delete or modify the entry for mozilla but 
> I'm not able to figure out which file it is.
>
> degoba:/var/cache/apt/archives# dpkg -i libtext-iconv-perl_1.2-2_i386.deb
> Selecting previously deselected package libtext-iconv-perl.
> (Reading database ...
> dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `mozilla-xft' 
> missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.
> dpkg: error processing libtext-iconv-perl_1.2-2_i386.deb (--install):
> files list file for package `mozilla' contains empty filename
> Errors were encountered while processing:
> libtext-iconv-perl_1.2-2_i386.deb
> Processing was halted because there were too many errors.


So you're saying you tried the package-specific "dpkg -i mozilla-xft" 
and it fails (because this is the package that seems to be causing the 
problem)? If so, I'd try to uninstall it with "dpkg --purge --remove 
mozilla-xft", and then try reinstalling it with "apt-get install 
mozilla-xft".

If that doesn't work, there's some files, I believe in /var/lib/dpkg, 
that might be causing the grief. I don't know which files do what, but 
I'd start with renaming "status" to something like "status.bak" and then 
try "apt-get update" and "apt-get install mozilla-xft". If that doesn't 
do it, I'd try other files (or search Google/Debian-User archives for 
the correct answer instead of trial-and-error, or wait for some more 
authoritative answer from this list).

I had a similar problem about two years ago, so you might search the 
archives of about that time for my name and something like "dpkg". But 
that memory is very hazy.

--
Kent