[Gllug] Debian package refusing to go

[James Hollingshead]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 09:43:00AM +0100, Jim Bailey wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 12:17:58AM -0700, John Davies wrote:
> > If you do 
> > apt-get remove --purge <package>
> > 
> > then Debian will remove all the config files as well
> > as the binaries. By default it doesn't.
> > 
> Sorry John should of made myself a bit clearer this was with the --purge
> option both with the _ option in dselect and the --purge option with
> apt-get.  The error message was something along the lines of directory
> not empty or something similar.  I wish I could remember what it was but
> it was months ago.

I think the "directory not empty" message is designed for those cases
where two or more packages share the use of a directory - for example
lots of emacs related packages provide files in /usr/share/emacs.

When you remove one emacs related package it will delete the files
that it owns in /usr/share/emacs, and then give the "directory not
empty" message and leave the dir there. If you remove emacs altogether
then the final package that you remove _should_ remove the last files
from /usr/share/emacs and then delete the empty dir.

So you can get the message you mention because you have other packages
installed (or not fully purged) with files in that directory. You
could also get it if there are files in the directory that no package
lays claim to, either because you have put them there or because
another program has written them there, or because the packaging
system has lost track of them for some reason (ie. badly written
packages).

I generally search to see if any package installed lays claim to the
directory (dpkg -S /usr/share/emacs), and if not, and it doesn't seem
to have anything important in it, I delete it. This is my own
conjecture from using the packaging system rather than reading the
docs/code though, so if you do it and everything breaks you get to
keep both halves...

James

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