Hi folks, I've been using Debian Stretch for a couple of months, and following this list for a month or two. I'm afraid I did something stupid anyway, and find myself with a damaged apt-get and can't figure out how to fix it short of reinstalling.
Here is what I did to damage it: The discussion about automatic upgrading contained a reference to "upgrade-system" and I decided to give it a try. I installed it, placed a recommended set of preferences in /etc/apt/preferences.d with a legally named file, and executed it # upgrade-system It should me what it wanted to do, mostly no surprises, except it's last item wanted to remove dozens and dozens of things, some of which I recognized as things I manually requested in connection with an earlier (and abandoned) experiment. So I said "no" to the prompt. So far so good. After a bit, I decided to back out of my interest in upgrade-system, and remove it with apt-get remove. And here is what I think was stupid: I had also played with the command "apt" which is another front to apt-get and friends, and perhaps misremembered whether it was already present, or whether I had to install it to play with it. What I did that was stupid was to add it to the packages to remove, so I entered this: # apt-get remove upgrade-system apt I am now unable to use any of my familiar package tools. Although "which" shows me apt-get, it cannot be found when attempting to execute it. Running aptitude complains about not finding apt-get. dpkg-reconfigure doesn't help, nor dpkg -i apt-get. Is there anything I can do short of reinstalling? I am no beginner, but I am pretty new to Debian. I am using a base system with a screen reader, no desktop. (which I installed with the netinst CD image on purpose, despite the defaults, which I don't regard as a problem). If I can get out of this one, I promise never to do a stupid thing again. Chuck -- When a clock is hungry it goes back four seconds.
