Richard Hector <rich...@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