Re: How to remove/purge outdated packages that are removed from repositories (apt-get --purge remove fails)
On 2013-05-09 11:41 +0200, Matthias Nagel wrote:
> 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
This is rather strange: if your architecture is i386, libc6-i686 is
still in archive; if you have another architecture, it never existed.
What does "dpkg --print-architecture" say?
> 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
Those are indeed all dead and gone from the archive.
> 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 ....".
This is also very strange.
> 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.
My suggestion is to try "dpkg --purge <package>", but I would also like
to know how you got yourself into this situation.
Cheers,
Sven
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