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Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management

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Richard Hector <richard@walnut.gen.nz> writes:

> Firstly, the standard response is that Raspbian is not Debian :-)
> There are differences which might be related to your problem.

Yes, of course.  I know.  But my question was not about the Raspbian
specific packages but on apt, dpkg, aptitude & co.  I assume, these
work mostly (or exactly) like in Debian.

> > I first wanted to upgrade everything which doesn't causes any
> > conflicts, which fails because of problems in wolfram-engine:
> 
> wolfram-engine appears not to be a debian package, for starters.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Ah. So perhaps a bug in that package. Or it's corrupted.
> 
> If you look at /var/lib/dpkg/info/wolfram-engine.list does it have an
> empty line in it? What happens if you edit that out?

OK, thanks for that hint.  This file indeed not only contained a blank
line, but it seems to be completely corrupted.  Roughly 5-10% of all
bytes in random positions are replaced with random (some ASCII, some
non-ASCII) values, making *lots* corrupted path names, which I can
still recognize/guess, but corrupted.  And one line had its last
character replaced by a new-line, thus making a blank line.  A quick
check

    # cd /var/lib/dpkg/info; file *.list | grep -v ASCII
    ca-certificates.list:                       UTF-8 Unicode text
    libmodule-build-perl.list:                  empty
    python-apt-common.list:                     data
    wolfram-engine.list:                        data
    
showed another corrupted file.  python-apt-common.list has the same
random errors.  Just curious, I wanted to know, whether all other
files contain valid and existing path names:

    # for f in *list; do echo $f; cat $f | tr '\n' '\0' | 
          xargs -0 ls -d >/dev/null ; done 2>&1 | less

Many package list files contain path names which seem valid but are
non-existent in the file system.  Is that normal?  On another
Debian stretch/amd64 system with 1868 packages installed I got only 3
packages each containing only 1 non-existent path name.

> I'd try deleting any blank lines from that file, and trying again.

Yes, I will try that.  Just to learn if it will fix things.  I expect
many errors because of the many broken path names which cannot be
removed.

However, since this system looks somewhat suspicious already and I
wanted to go to buster (or maybe bullseye) anyway, I will save /home
and relevant stuff from /var and then reinstall from scratch.  After
testing the SD card.  Seems to be easier.

> Or maybe apt-get install --reinstall wolfram-engine

It all leads to the same error message as above.
I don't need Wolfram anyway, it's been installed by default.

> Or ask on a Raspbian list :-)

Hm, probably I wasn't clear enough.  My question was not about
Raspbian or the wolfram package, but about dpkg and friends.  Isn't
there a better way to remove packages if the .list file corrupted?
And isn't there a way to temporarily ignore such errors and install or
upgrade other packages despite such an error?  Even dpkg --force-all
didn't help so I couldn't do aynthing.  I found it surpring that a
single broken package leaves you in a state where you're stuck and
cannot go out, easily.

> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/425355/x11-common-contains-empty-filename

Looks very similar to my problem.

urs

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Thread

Single broken package blocks whole package management Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2022-01-05 14:50 +0100
  Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management Richard Hector <richard@walnut.gen.nz> - 2022-01-05 15:30 +0100
    Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com> - 2022-01-05 16:20 +0100
      Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2022-01-05 17:40 +0100
        Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org> - 2022-01-05 18:20 +0100
        Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org> - 2022-01-05 18:20 +0100
    Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management Urs Thuermann <urs@isnogud.escape.de> - 2022-01-05 17:00 +0100
  Re: Single broken package blocks whole package management David Wright <deblis@lionunicorn.co.uk> - 2022-01-05 17:00 +0100

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