Package: dpkg Version: 1.16.15 Severity: important Dear Maintainer,
This bug is related to #735159, and I ran into it during an attempted upgrade to Jessie, but it concerns the version of dpkg in Wheezy (1.16.15), not the one in Jessie (1.7.x). Also, the details are somewhat different. My system has been upgraded several times already, and has therefore accumulated quite a few old packages which were left over from previous Debian releases, among them gcc-4.1-doc. During the upgrade to Jessie, apt-get complained that it couldn't deinstall gcc-4.1-doc. Trying to remove just the single package resulted in the same error message: # apt-get remove gcc-4.1-doc Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following packages will be REMOVED: gcc-4.1-doc 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1066 not upgraded. After this operation, 5,181 kB disk space will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y (Reading database ... 327691 files and directories currently installed.) Removing gcc-4.1-doc ... install-info: No dir file specified; try --help for more information. dpkg: error processing gcc-4.1-doc (--remove): subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: gcc-4.1-doc E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) The problem is apparently that the prerm script in gcc-4.1-doc calls install-info as: install-info --quiet --remove /usr/share/info/gcc-4.1.info But the version of install-info included in pkg-1,6,x requires an additional parameter DIR-FILE, so prerm fails and the package is not removed. I didn't find an option to force removal of the package. (Editing /var/lib/dpkg/info/gcc-4.1-doc.prerm should work, of course) I see two ways to fix this issue: * make install-info backwards-compatible by making the DIR-FILE parameter optional again. * Provide dpkg with an option to force removal of a package even if prerm fails. Like --force-remove-reinstreq this might result in parts of the package to remain on the system. -- System Information: Debian Release: 8.0 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages dpkg depends on: ii libbz2-1.0 1.0.6-7+b2 ii libc6 2.19-13 ii liblzma5 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2+b3 ii libselinux1 2.3-2 ii tar 1.27.1-2+b1 ii zlib1g 1:1.2.8.dfsg-2+b1 dpkg recommends no packages. Versions of packages dpkg suggests: ii apt 1.0.9.4 -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
