Re: After upgrading to stretch, a package refuses to purge or upgrade

[Roberto C. Sánchez <roberto@debian.org>]

On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 07:04:08AM -0500, Martin McCormick wrote:
> Charlie Kravetz <charlie@keepingdreams.com> writes:
> > You may have to remove Orca and all associated programs before you can
> > remove espeakup.
> 
> 	Thanks and you are correct but orca is not installed on
> either of the two systems so thankfully, that won't be necessary
> 
> > Other than that, someone much wiser than myself will step in and help
> > out.
> 
> 	I feel kind of ashamed at a time like this as I have been
> working in the unix world for 30 years this year and the one
> thing I do know is that one must be very careful to first do no
> harm.  I will see if I can purge each of the packages that
> apt-get autoremove says can be safely removed and do this one at
> a time since apt-get autoremove just tries and complains if you
> do it as a batch.
> 
Sadly, this sort of breakage happens from time to time.  I downloaded
the espeakup binary package and found that the pre-removal script
contents are as follows:

#!/bin/sh
set -e
# Automatically added by dh_installinit
if [ -x "/etc/init.d/espeakup" ]; then
        invoke-rc.d espeakup stop || exit $?
fi
# End automatically added section


I the espeakup is really not running and you don't need to worry about
stopping it, then a simple 'sudo chmod a-x /etc/init.d/espeakup' will
prevent the prerm script from trying to stop the service.

That should let you get past the error and continue with the removals
and installations.

Regards,

-Roberto

-- 
Roberto C. Sánchez