[Nottingham] Removing broken deb

[Alex Tibbles]

firstly:
> More generally - am I correct in thinking that
> there's no way to gracefully downgrade all the
> packages I have from unstable to testing using apt?
there was an article on this on debianplanet:
http://debianplanet.org/node.php?id=880
that is about downgrading testing to stable. there is
a listing in the article of a fairly manual way of
doing it. below in a long comment, there is a
discription of doing the same using apt pinning. 
'apt-get -t testing <apt-command>' may be of use too
(not sure). it does <apt-command> (eg install
<package>, upgrade) with preference for testing.

to be honest - i don't see much point in downgrading
to testing en masse. if an individual package is
broken in unstable, then downgrade that manually, or
wait. testing is just unstable with lag. merely
changing your apt sources and waiting will give a
system that approaches testing.

> I'm currently stuck with a very broken
> openoffice.org package following an ill-advised
> attempt to mix packages from stable, testing and
> unstable on one system.  I'd like to completely
> remove it (and install the binaries manually), and
> have tried both apt-get remove openoffice.org and
> apt-get -f install (at apt's suggestion), but get
> stuck with:
> 
> root at DJBC:/etc/apt# apt-get -f install
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree... Done
> Correcting dependencies... Done
> The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   openoffice.org 
> 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove
> and 816  not upgraded.
> 4 packages not fully installed or removed.
> Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 29.0MB
> will be freed.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
> dpkg: error processing openoffice.org (--remove):
>  Package is in a very bad inconsistent state - you
> should
>  reinstall it before attempting a removal.
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  openoffice.org
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code
> (1)
> 
> Attempting a reinstall per suggestion from dpkg does
> not work.
> 
> Could anyone give me some pointers as to where to go
> from here?

Did you try re-installing with apt-get or dpkg? Have
you removed all other openoffice.org-* packages (which
depend on openoffice.org, I think)?

you could try wget'ing the openoffice.org* packages
(www.debian.org/distrib/packages#search_packages)
manually and dpkg --install'ing them in one command
line. (perhaps this is what you meant by 'Attempting a
reinstall').

Could you get the dpkg error message?

This seems similar:
http://linux.ucla.edu/pipermail/linux/2001-February/004728.html
follow up here:
http://linux.ucla.edu/pipermail/linux/2001-February/004729.html

You might be able to follow the advice in the follow
up. Cheat the broken script. Remove the package.
Manually do what the script does (correctly)?

Good luck.

alex


	
	
		
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