Re: How to remove exim4 when aptitude doesnt think its installed?

[Andy <andy@besy.co.uk>]

Bryan Donlan wrote:
> On 11/30/05, T <mlist4suntong@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 29 Nov 2005 17:12:35 +0000, Andy wrote:
> >
> > > Hello List,
> > >
> > > How should I go about removing files relating to the exim4 package, when
> > > aptitude doesn't think the package is installed?
> > This is the very situation that low level command dpg comes into play. Try:
> >
> > dpkg --purge exim4
>
> This won't work. Aptitude uses the dpkg databases to determine what is
> installed. Additionally, exim4's just a metapackage depending on the
> actual exim4 packages. In this case, he'll probably need to reinstall
> exim4, then remove it. For example:
>
> wget http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4-base_4.50-8_i386.deb
> http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4-daemon-light_4.50-8_i386.deb
> dpkg --force-depends --unpack exim4-base_4.50-8_i386.deb
> exim4-daemon-light_4.50-8_i386.deb
> dpkg --purge exim4-base exim4-daemon-light

Thanks for your suggestion.

I tried it this morning and found that while "exim4-base" installed and 
purged fine, dpkg refused to install "exim4-daemon-light", complaining...

"exim4-daemon-light conflicts with mail-transport-agent. Postfix 
provides mail-transport-agent and is installed."

After some further reading of the dpkg man page I ended up with the 
following sequence of commands:

1) Download packages:

# wget ...
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4_4.50-8_all.deb
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4-base_4.50-8_i386.deb
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4-config_4.50-8_all.deb
http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/e/exim4/exim4-daemon-light_4.50-8_i386.deb

2) Install packages through dpkg. Note the use of --force-conflicts and 
--force-overwrite. The later will cause files relating to the postfix 
package to be over-written. (ouch!)

# dpkg --force-depends --unpack exim4_4.50-8_all.deb
# dpkg --force-depends --unpack exim4-base_4.50-8_i386.deb
# dpkg --force-depends --unpack --force-conflicts 
exim4-config_4.50-8_all.deb
# dpkg --force-depends --unpack --force-conflicts --force-overwrite 
exim4-daemon-light_4.50-8_i386.deb

3) Purge packages:

# dpkg --purge exim4 exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light

4) Fix postfix. This should reinstall the files that were over-written 
when forcing the install of exim4-daemon-light.

# aptitude reinstall postfix

This seems to have done the trick, but does anyone see any problems with 
this process?

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction,

Andy