Re: dpkg: error "ambiguous package name" during upgrade to multiarch package

[Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>]

reassign 667843 apt 0.8.15.10
forcemerge 665727 667843
quit

Hi,

Flavio Stanchina wrote:

>                                  The plan was to find a couple of packages
> that I don't normally use, with a small set of dependencies, and try to
> install the i386 version of those packages on amd64. The packages I chose
> were mboxgrep and pcregrep because I already installed libpcre3:i386 as a
> first test. Here's the result, notice how it wants to upgrade libbz2 which
> was still the non-multiarch version from squeeze:
>
> # apt-get install -t testing mboxgrep:i386 pcregrep:i386 bzip2
[...]
> Preparing to replace libbz2-1.0 1.0.5-6+squeeze1 (using .../libbz2-1.0_1.0.6-1_amd64.deb) ...
> Unpacking replacement libbz2-1.0:amd64 ...
> Selecting previously unselected package libbz2-1.0:i386.
> Unpacking libbz2-1.0:i386 (from .../libbz2-1.0_1.0.6-1_i386.deb) ...
> Processing triggers for man-db ...
> dpkg: error: --configure needs a valid package name but 'libbz2-1.0' is not: ambiguous package name 'libbz2-1.0' with more than one installed instance
>
> Type dpkg --help for help about installing and deinstalling packages [...]
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
>
> I tried the next command to see if the problem would fix itself (a simple
> "apt-get install" would probably have had the same effect):
>
> # apt-get install -t testing bzip2
[...]
> dpkg: error: --configure needs a valid package name but 'libbz2-1.0' is not: ambiguous package name 'libbz2-1.0' with more than one installed instance
[...]
> Next I tried to purge libbz2-1.0:i386 and this did the trick, as there was
> then only one instance of the package to configure:

Good catch.  Reassigning to apt.

I suspect this is fixed in experimental already.

Hope that helps,
Jonathan