Bug#237470: state of #237470
On Sat, Nov 6, 2010 at 14:16, Jakub Wilk <jwilk@debian.org> wrote:
> affects 237470 localepurge
> thanks
>
> * David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com>, 2010-11-06, 13:24:
>>>
>>> I can reproduce the bug in lenny, squeeze and sid by trying to reinstall
>>> dpkg and coreutils:
>>
>> The question is: Is it really a bug?
>>
>> Both, dpkg and coreutils are Essential: yes so they pre-depend implicit on
>> each other.
>
> Interesting. That would suggest you can trigger this bug^Wissue by trying to
> reinstall together any 2 essential packages. But this is not the case: I can
> reinstall coreutils+debianutils (whereas the original bug reporter couldn't
> do that in 2004):
Sorry for the confusion, i didn't intended to say that this is what APT does,
its just my personal view of this problem and mostly added to the bugreport
to show that this is in general not a simple situation that a high-level
package manager like APT must have to deal with.
(bugs like this one tend get set to important or higher out of a sudden as
the description so far sounds like a simple one-or-two line fix…
It seems that the word "Essential" triggers a bell somewhere)
APT in its current implementation doesn't has this kind of special handling
for Essentials for example - it mostly only tries to avoid remove them.
> # apt-get install --reinstall coreutils debianutils
Even the dpkg coreutils example works if all dependencies are dropped
expect dpkg versioned one on coreutils, so the assumption that it is
a versioned pre-depends thing doesn't seem to be true for this case.
Or in other words: We have some strange situation here which properly
triggers a bug (which is why i haven't done anything to the bug itself)
just that we are still on square one in the sense that we don't know why.
I hopefully i have later the week a bit of time to look deeper into it…
>> ¹ The --reinstall flag doesn't do any magic, it just reinstalls the
>> package, it doesn't purge, doesn't reset the configuration or anything else,
>> so the only reason a user could have to ask for a reinstall is that he e.g.
>> accidentally removed or overwrote some of the files included in this
>> package.
>
> FYI, I spotted this behaviour when trying to recover files deleted by
> localepurge, using the command recommended in its README.Debian:
>
> apt-get --reinstall install $(dpkg -S LC_MESSAGES | cut -d: -f1 | tr ', '
> '\n' | sort -u)
Beside that the maintainers of localepurge should maybe evaluate how they
can use the relatively new --exclude/include-path options of dpkg instead
i would try something along the lines of
apt-get clean
apt-get --reinstall --download-only install $(dpkg -S LC_MESSAGES |
cut -d: -f1 | tr ', ' '\n' | sort -u)
dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
dpkg should be better in working out what it needs to do in case of dependency
loops (which you have without doubt - otherwise looking at bootstrap output
wouldn't be so painful [with your package manager hat on]) as it knows which
maintainer files are included in a package and therefore maybe able to break
loops - but i haven't tested it…
Best regards
David Kalnischkies
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