For the record, I'd like to describe the steps I took to solve the
problem. As David pointed out, this really has nothing to do with R,
but it's *just possible* that someone might find it handy.
To those who are not interested (everybody?) I apologise. Please just
press the <delete> key.
The problem was that when I did:
sudo apt-get upgrade
I got an error message to the effect:
Setting up avahi-dnsconfd (0.7-3.1ubuntu1.1) ...
Failed to restart avahi-dnsconfd.service: Unit avahi-daemon.service is masked.
invoke-rc.d: initscript avahi-dnsconfd, action "restart" failed.
● avahi-dnsconfd.service - Avahi DNS Configuration Daemon
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/avahi-dnsconfd.service; enabled; vendor
preset: enabled)
Active: inactive (dead)
I had previously Googled around about the avahi business and had found
nothing useful, but when I tried again I found:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=768620
which contained the lines:
Dear Maintainer,
to resolve this mess manually these steps are sufficient:
systemctl disable avahi-daemon
apt-get --reinstall install avahi-daemon
systemctl enable avahi-daemon
after that i can reinstall the packages without any problems
I then tried
sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon
and got (amongst other things) the message
/etc/systemd/system/avahi-daemon.service is masked, ignoring.
More Googling about the "masked" business seemed to reveal that masking
is effected by making a symbolic link from the file in question to
/dev/null, and if this is the case then unmasking can be accomplished by
removing the symbolic link.
I did
cd /etc/systemd/system
ls -l avahi-daemon.service
and indeed got
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Aug 20 16:05 avahi-daemon.service -> /dev/null
So I then did:
sudo rm avahi-daemon.service
sudo systemctl disable avahi-daemon
and this time it seemed to run OK.
I then tried "sudo apt-get upgrade" again. The first time I got the
slightly ominous:
Setting up avahi-dnsconfd (0.7-3.1ubuntu1.1) ...
W: APT had planned for dpkg to do more than it reported back (0 vs 4).
Affected packages: avahi-dnsconfd:amd64
But a second iteration seemed to produce a clean bill of health.
I then tried "sudo apt-get install r-base" one more time,
and encountered a further but entirely separate problem (to which I have
alluded before) but which is really a separate issue. And really *is*
an R (or R-Sig-Debian) problem.
But I think that is best dealt with in a new thread.
cheers,
Rolf Turner
--
Honorary Research Fellow
Department of Statistics
University of Auckland
Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
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