Bug#601959: science-linguistics: upgrading from lenny fails

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Alexander,

On Fri, Nov 05, 2010 at 09:50:41AM +0100, Alexander Reichle-Schmehl wrote:
> I could verify the problem as described by Lucas.  Andreas, note that at
> the point of the error, blends-common is only unpacked, but not yet
> configured.  So I guess in the "science-lingustics depends science-config
> depends blends-common" line should be (at least one) pre-depends, but
> I'm not entirely sure where.

I was also able to reproduce the problem and have done some debugging
which boils down to a result I completely fail to understand.  If I
change in the lenny chroot the file
/var/lib/dpkg/info/science-linguistics.postrm  to something like

set +e
	db_version 2.0
set -e

everything works smoothly.  I have no idea at all why the db_version
call throws a non-zero exit code without any message nor if this is a
consequence of some other previous problem.

However, I can not change the postrm of the Lenny package anyway and so
I probably need to find a workaround for the "missing" config file in
/etc/blends which is actually there and has the extension .dpkg-new.
The question is whether I should really introduce a pre-depends (I
actually do not really see a real need for this) or whether I should
just use the dpkg-new file as fall back.  Both "solutions" are simply
dirty and I think finding the real reason for the problem would be
helpful in finding a real solution - but for the moment I somehow tend
to really use pre-depends (and will drop it after the Squeeze release).

Thanks for having a look into this - any further hints are welcome

      Andreas.

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