repairing damage to package manager
Hi folks,
I've been using Debian Stretch for a couple of months, and following
this list for a month or two. I'm afraid I did something stupid anyway,
and find myself with a damaged apt-get and can't figure out how to fix
it short of reinstalling.
Here is what I did to damage it:
The discussion about automatic upgrading contained a reference to
"upgrade-system" and I decided to give it a try.
I installed it, placed a recommended set of preferences in
/etc/apt/preferences.d with a legally named file, and executed it
# upgrade-system
It should me what it wanted to do, mostly no surprises, except it's
last item wanted to remove dozens and dozens of things, some of which I
recognized as things I manually requested in connection with an earlier
(and abandoned) experiment.
So I said "no" to the prompt. So far so good.
After a bit, I decided to back out of my interest in upgrade-system,
and remove it with apt-get remove.
And here is what I think was stupid:
I had also played with the command "apt" which is another front to
apt-get and friends, and perhaps misremembered whether it was already
present, or whether I had to install it to play with it. What I did
that was stupid was to add it to the packages to remove, so I entered
this:
# apt-get remove upgrade-system apt
I am now unable to use any of my familiar package tools. Although
"which" shows me apt-get, it cannot be found when attempting to execute
it. Running aptitude complains about not finding apt-get.
dpkg-reconfigure doesn't help, nor dpkg -i apt-get.
Is there anything I can do short of reinstalling? I am no beginner, but
I am pretty new to Debian. I am using a base system with a screen
reader, no desktop. (which I installed with the netinst CD image on
purpose, despite the defaults, which I don't regard as a problem).
If I can get out of this one, I promise never to do a stupid thing
again.
Chuck
--
When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
Reply to: