Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management

[Richard Hector <richard@walnut.gen.nz>]

On 6/01/22 02:32, Urs Thuermann wrote:
> After an dist-upgrade from Raspian 8 (jessie) to 9.13 (stretch)
> hundreds of packages still need to be upgraded and aptitude reports
> numerous conflicts.

Firstly, the standard response is that Raspbian is not Debian :-) There 
are differences which might be related to your problem.

> I first wanted to upgrade everything which doesn't causes any
> conflicts, which fails because of problems in wolfram-engine:

wolfram-engine appears not to be a debian package, for starters.

[snip]

>      Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^(.*?)(\\)?\${ <-- HERE ([^{}]+)}(.*)$/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 72.
>      Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^}]+)}/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 30.

Looks bad, but deprecation isn't an error.

[snip]

>      dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
>       files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename
>      E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
>      Failed to perform requested operation on package.  Trying to recover:

Ah. So perhaps a bug in that package. Or it's corrupted.

If you look at /var/lib/dpkg/info/wolfram-engine.list does it have an 
empty line in it? What happens if you edit that out?

>      root@uranus:~#
>
> I tried to remove packages wolfram-engine and wolframscript, also
> tried to remove debconf-utils, but everything fails with the same
> error message:
>
>      root@uranus:~# dpkg --force-all -P wolfram-engine
>      dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
>       files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename

Same thing

> Also, upgrading a single package that's completely unrelated, is not
> possible:
>
>      root@uranus:~# aptitude install acl
>      The following packages will be upgraded:
>        acl libacl1
>      The following partially installed packages will be configured:
>        debconf-utils{b}
>      2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1005 not upgraded.
>      Need to get 0 B/80.7 kB of archives. After unpacking 49.2 kB will be used.
>      The following packages have unmet dependencies:
>       debconf-utils : Depends: debconf (= 1.5.61) but 1.5.56+deb8u1 is installed and it is kept back.
>      The following actions will resolve these dependencies:
>
>           Remove the following packages:
>      1)     debconf-utils
>
>
>
>      Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]
>      The following packages will be REMOVED:
>        debconf-utils{a}
>      The following packages will be upgraded:
>        acl libacl1
>      2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1005 not upgraded.
>      Need to get 0 B/80.7 kB of archives. After unpacking 58.4 kB will be freed.
>      Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
>      Reading changelogs... Done
>      Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^(.*?)(\\)?\${ <-- HERE ([^{}]+)}(.*)$/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 72.
>      Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^}]+)}/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 30.
>      dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
>       files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename
>      E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
>      Failed to perform requested operation on package.  Trying to recover:

Still comes back to the same thing.
>      root@uranus:~#
>      
> What else can I do to get the package management working again?

I'd try deleting any blank lines from that file, and trying again.

Or maybe apt-get install --reinstall wolfram-engine

Or ask on a Raspbian list :-)

A related question here:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/425355/x11-common-contains-empty-filename

Cheers,
Richard