Hi all,

I installed Libranet (a nice Debian clone) this morning. I changed 'Woody' to 'Sid' in /etc/apt/sources.list. After that, I did a 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.

Everything went fine, but suddenly I got this ugly error:
VERY annoying! Because my dependencies are broken now, and my distro isn't updated yet. I tried everything (apt-get remove gnome-session2, apt-get update gnome-session2, dpkg --remove gnome-session2, dpkg --force-all --remove gnome-session2, apt-get install -f, ..) but nothing worked!

Please please please, anyone, how can I fix this and continue my distro upgrade?!

Thanks in advance!

From http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgre...gnome-session2

So, um, where did you get this gnome-session2 package? It doesn't seem to have ever been in the official Debian distribution. (and as such, it's your fault )

try to use dselect instead of apt, that will fix most such broken packages

dselect bad, aptitude good

In these sorts of emergencies, I've sometimes resorted to manually editing the offending package's scripts.

Try peeking at /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnome-session2.prerm

You can fix or comment out the offending lines of code, which will allow the package removal (and the rest of your update) to proceed.

One thing that might be helpful in figuring out what's going on in the script is to edit /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/70debconf, and adding the line

DPkg::Options {"-D3";}

to the file. That will turn on debugging output, and may tell you what's broken.

I was having this exact problem upgrading to "testing" from the Libranet 2.7 classic.

In the /var/lib/dpkg/info/gnome-session2.prerm comment out the line that starts "--slave ..." and the line right below it.

Turns out the "--slave" parameter is false when used with the "--remove" parameter. I says this in the error output, but I wouldn't have know where to fix it.

Thanks.