Adam Hardy wrote:
I want to understand what apt-get does with the files of a package I'm having problems with, but there seems to be stuff going on that the man page isn't telling me about.I installed tomcat5.5 and then tomcat5.5-admin.There seemed to be some serious problem with the tomcat manager installed by tomcat5.5-admin, which stopped tomcat starting, so I tried to de-install it.I ran apt-get remove tomcat5.5-adminThe problem though remained - the tomcat manager settings were preventing a clean start-up.So I ran apt-get --purge remove tomcat5.5-admin This made no difference. So I ran apt-get --purge remove tomcat5.5to clear the whole lot. However it let various tomcat files in /usr/share/tomcat5.5/ which I manually deleted.
Those files that you deleted probably belong to some other package that tomcat5.5 depends on. So, apt has no way of knowing that the files are deleted.
I re-installed tomcat, but the bootstrap.jar - one of the main start-up binaries - was not reinstalled.
You can try 'dpkg-query -L tomcat5.5' to see a list of files that come with the package. Also 'dpkg-query -S bootstrap.jar' should tell you which package provided the bootstrap.jar file.
You can also try apt-cache depends tomcat5.5 to get a list of all the dependencies and reinstall them with 'apt-get --reinstall install'
Why did this happen? Surely a purge should wipe the slate clean? Thanks Adam
-- Raj Kiran Grandhi --At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer, you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.