[ale] Debian package insanity

Jason Day jasonday at worldnet.att.net
Mon May 15 13:42:07 EDT 2006


First, some background:

I have a server currently running debian sarge.  It was upgraded a few
months ago from woody, which it ran for years.  This is a headless
server, so I don't run X on it, but I do occasionally use X client
programs, like, say, display.  Or, at least I did.  So I need the X libs
and clients and related dependencies installed, and xauth, for tunneling
the X connections over ssh.  But since the upgrade to sarge, xauth is no
longer available.

So I did a little searching and discovered that the xauth program is in
the xbase-clients package.  So I tried to install xbase-clients, but
dpkg complained that it was trying to overwrite a directory that was in
the xterm package.  So I tried to uninstall xterm, but that complains
about a file in the package not existing.

So, as near as I can determine, I need to uninstall xterm, but I can't
uninstall it because it's not installed.  And I can't reinstall it,
because it uses a directory that's in xutils, which I also can remove
because it doesn't seem to be installed either.

Here is one of the exceedingly helpful messages I get:

spiderman:/home/jday# aptitude install -f
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree       
Reading extended state information       
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done  
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  xbase-clients 
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  xterm 
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/2853kB of archives. After unpacking 4014kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] 
Writing extended state information... Done
(Reading database ... 48227 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace xutils 4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1 (using .../xutils_4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1_i386.deb) ...
Unpacking replacement xutils ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/xutils_4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1_i386.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/usr/X11R6/bin', which is also in package xterm
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/xutils_4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
Ack!  Something bad happened while installing packages.  Trying to recover:
Reading Package Lists... Done             
Building Dependency Tree       
Reading extended state information       
Initializing package states... Done
Reading task descriptions... Done  
spiderman:/home/jday# 


And:

spiderman:/home/jday# dpkg -r --force-all xterm
(Reading database ... 48227 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing xterm ...
dpkg: error processing xterm (--remove):
 cannot remove file `/usr/X11R6/bin/xterm': Not a directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
 xterm
spiderman:/home/jday#


Anybody have any idea what I should try next?

Thanks,
Jason
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9



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