On Tue, Aug 14, 2007 at 07:24:05AM -0700, Daniel Burrows wrote:
> Well, you asked aptitude to upgrade that package, but its dpkg
> database entry appears to be corrupted in a bad way. There's no way for
> aptitude to find out which package broke (short of something horrible
> and error-prone, like parsing the dpkg output), so it has to assume that
> everything it was trying to install broke.
>
> Maybe you should fix your problem by reinstalling gnokii, like
> the error message says? If you don't want to do that, your other
> option is to hold it back.
It could not be reinstalled, because the postrm script was broken.
Also putting it on hold did not work, because apt thought it was so
broken that it needed to be fixed anyway, and as a result failed to
fix it and refused to install any other packages. As far as I could
tell, there were exactly two ways of resolving the situation so that
apt is again able to upgrade other packages:
1) Fix the gnokii package postrm script by hand (which I believe is
something that a normal user shouldn't need to do)
2) Upgrade to a newer, fixed version of gnokii (which still does not
exist).
If it's only the gnokii db entry that's corrupted, I think it should
still be possible to put it in hold so that apt would not touch it,
but that's just not what apt does even if it's on hold.
If you want to see what I mean, look at #431706. (Huh, it seems I
forgot to mention that bug in my report, sorry about that.)
I believe you can also reproduce this by first installing
gnokii-0.6.17-1 and then trying to upgrade to gnokii-0.6.18-1 (which
is still current in unstable). The brokenness is caused by both
versions having a broken postrm script.
> I'm going to reassign this to apt since that's the highest layer where
> this could be fixed.
I guess you are correct about that.
Sami
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