Re: many segfaults scrolled by when updating with aptitude now X won't start

[Adam Porter <adam@alphapapa.net>]

Daniel Johnson wrote:

> Last night I was doing a long overdue update on a system I use mostly
> for learning.  Many things must have gone horribly wrong during the
> update as a result of all of the segfaults, but aptitude seemed to
> think it was a success.  I'm not sure what all is broken, but I know
> that X for sure is broken, and no amount of forcing reinstallation of
> packages has worked so far.
> 
> What I want to do is two fold.  I want to tell debian to just go
> ahead, and try to reinstall everything, as it is probably still in the
> package cache, and I can't think of any other way to make sure all
> files got saved in place, and that the scripts in the packages got
> executed.  And I want to check for stray files that may not have been
> deleted due to something like a segfault when it was attempting to rm
> a file.
> 
> I feel like there has got to be some tools to do this kind of thing,
> but I haven't been able to figure out what can do either of those
> tasks yet after several hours of trying to figure it out on my own.

Well, one simple thing is to run:

$ sudo dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb

But there's no guarantee that will fix it; it seems like using a
sledgehammer on a nail to me.

For stray files...that's tougher.  You might look into the tiger package,
but you might end up having to do a lot of manual removal.