Hi All,
I have an ongoing problem with apt-get. It all started with mozilla-firebird 0.6. I tried to install it but apt-get will not overwrite the libxrender file. I've even tried to use libxrender-dev under testing. No luck just a broken package. I've have a mix system. Below is the output when I tried to remove libxrender and a simular message occurs if I tried to remove libxrender-dev or run just plain old apt-get -f install or apt-get -f remove. No luck.

I would appreciate your expertise on this problem.

Regards,

Larry

kms:/home/stevie# apt-get -f install
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libxrender-dev
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 531 not upgraded.
31 packages not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 135kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
(Reading database ... 103137 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing libxrender-dev ...
No diversion `diversion of /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.a to /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender-1.1.a by libxrender-dev', none removed
Removing `diversion of /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so to /usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender-1.1.so by libxrender-dev'
dpkg-divert: rename involves overwriting `/usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender.so' with
different file `/usr/X11R6/lib/libXrender-1.1.so', not allowed
dpkg: error processing libxrender-dev (--remove):
subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
libxrender-dev
localepurge: processing locale files ...
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Seems that you have messed up your diversions database with some strange version of libxrenderer. See the bugreport for details (well, not actually a bug, but the fellow there had the same problem).

In general, if you do have a problem with a package, a good place to start is to see what
http://bugs.debian.org/packgage has to say.

What version of libxrender are you trying to remove? The most recent package is libxrender1.1_1.1-0.5_i386.deb - try d/l that and do a dpkg --force-all -i on that, it may correct the diversions database and let you subsequentially remove it to downgrade.

Or force a downgrade with a --force-all -i straight to an older version to fix the broken libxrender.

Or if they do not want to behave correctly, modify the database manually (/var/lib/dpkg/diversion); the syntax is pretty straight forward. That is, remove all diversions related to libxrender, remove all libxrender -packages and start from the point zero again with correct/newer packages.

Also note that xlibs -package also contains the file in question, so a reinstall of xlibs (or atleast a check that the contents of the package is ok [debsums is a friend]) after removal of libxrender might also be a good idea too.