How to remove/purge outdated packages that are removed from repositories (apt-get --purge remove fails)
Hello,
after I had upgraded to Wheezy this week, I ran the command "apt-show-versions | egrep -v wheezy" and I was suprised to see the following result:
gcc-4.2-base 4.2.4-6 installed: No available version in archive
libbind9-40 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
libc6-i686 2.11.3-4 installed: No available version in archive
libdb4.5 4.5.20-13 installed: No available version in archive
libdns45 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
libevent1 1.3e-3 installed: No available version in archive
libisc45 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
libisccc40 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
libisccfg40 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
liblwres40 1:9.5.1.dfsg.P3-1+lenny1 installed: No available version in archive
libvolume-id0 0.125-7+lenny3 installed: No available version in archive
Obviously there are some very old packages still remaining from Lenny. First I ran the command on one of my machines, that used a mixed stable/unstable installation with Squeeze and was upgraded to Wheezy to ensure that the upgrade did, what it was supposed to do. But after I found this result I executed the same command on all my other machines, that were a pure Squeezy stable installation before and are now a pure Wheezy stable installation. The results were the same. On all my machines there are some packages from Lenny years ago. (Thas was the time, my servers were set up.)
Theses packages also own some files, that are of no need any more (for example, libvolume-id0 0.125-7+lenny3 owns the file /lib/libvolume.0.....). I wanted to remove these packages and tried the command
apt-get --purge remove libvolume-id0
but the command failed with the error "Unable to locate package ....".
In the next step I added the Lenny repository again to my /etc/apt/sources.list from the archive repositories and ran a "apt-get update". My hope was that as soon as apt knows the old packages again, I would be able to remove them. But this was not true. This way I could remove some of the packages, but not all.
Here is the question: How do I get rid of these packages and their files? It seems that these packages are in some kind of "zombie" state. Some commands like "dpkg-query" know the packages and can deal with some, other command like "apt-get" do not know them.
Thank you, Matthias
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Matthias Nagel
Willy-Andreas-Allee 1, Zimmer 506
76131 Karlsruhe
Telefon: +49-721-8695-1506
Mobil: +49-151-15998774
e-Mail: matthias.h.nagel@gmail.com
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Skype: nagmat84
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