"Conflicts/Pre-Depends loop" & "APT::Force-LoopBreak"
cel...@gmail.com
Hi,
I run a somewhat out of date installation of Testing. When trying to
update
some packages, apt-get fails with the following message:
---
E: This installation run will require temporarily removing the essential
package e2fsprogs due to a Conflicts/Pre-Depends loop. This is often
bad, but
if you really want to do it, activate the APT::Force-LoopBreak option.
E: Internal Error, Could not early remove e2fsprogs"
---
From 'man apt-get':
---
Force-LoopBreak
Never Enable this option unless you -really- know what
you are
doing. It per-
mits APT to temporarily remove an essential package to
break a
Conflicts/Con-
flicts or Conflicts/Pre-Depend loop between two
essential
packages. SUCH A
LOOP SHOULD NEVER EXIST AND IS A GRAVE BUG. This
option
will work if the
essential packages are not tar, gzip, libc, dpkg, bash or
anything that those
packages depend on.
---
I do -not- really know what I am doing :). How / where should I report
this
"GRAVE BUG", and how might I solve this problem? Is it safe to do a
'Force-
LoopBreak' in this case?
I can supply the output of 'dpkg -l' and the exact list of packages
that I was
attempting to install / upgrade upon request.
Kent West
I've run into this on my last two installs, using an older pre-Sarge
netinstall CD, and then trying to upgrade to current Sid.
In both cases, I was able to get around the problem by creating the file
"/etc/apt/apt.conf" and putting in it the line:
APT::Force-LoopBreak "true";
After doing my upgrade, I remove/rename that file to avoid potential
issues in the future.
I'm not sure where to file a bug report; probably against apt-get. I
believe the package "reportbug" might help in this process.
--
Kent
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cel...@gmail.com
sane, although I did get many scary warnings from dpkg during the
upgrade. I also got many complaints from perl about problems setting
the locales for several packages, but I suppose that has nothing to do
with the original problem. Now I'm going to look into where to report
this. Thanks for the help, Kent.
> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 10:33:55 -0500
> From: Kent West <we...@acu.edu>
> To: debia...@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re:
> Message-ID: <4360F363...@acu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> cel...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > Thanks, Kent. I know that the man page says that doing
> > Force-LoopBreak is an option, but as I quoted in my mail it is
> > apparently a risky thing to do. Was your problem / solution also
> with
> > the e2fsprogs package?
> >
> Yes, it was.
>
>