Cannot do updates with synaptic, updatemanager or apt-get

Bug #159163 reported by Cory Albrecht
256
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
synaptic (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I cannot do updates with UpdateManager, Synaptic or apt-get.

UpdateManager fails with the following:

E: /var/cache/apt/archives/bittorrent_3.4.2-11ubuntu3~7.10_all.deb: files list file for package `gnome-user-guide' contains empty filename

That error stays the same, only the nameof the package changes based on what I select or deselect in UpdateManager.

Synaptic give the same error, again with only the package name changed, based on what package(s) I selected in Synaptic to install.

With apt-get the follwoing happens, regardless of what I try to install:

[root@redbarchetta] 19:27:41 [3]~> apt-get install amarok-engines
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  amarok-engines
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B/884B of archives.
After unpacking, 20.5kB of additional disk space will be used.
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/amarok-engines_2%3a1.4.7-0ubuntu3_i386.deb (--unpack):
 files list file for package `gnome-user-guide' contains empty filename
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/amarok-engines_2%3a1.4.7-0ubuntu3_i386.deb
Processing was halted because there were too many errors.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)
[root@redbarchetta] 19:41:31 [4]~>

And a remove results in this:

[root@redbarchetta] 19:42:46 [6]~> apt-get remove bittorrent
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  bittorrent gnome-btdownload ubuntu-desktop
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives.
After unpacking, 676kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
(Reading database ... dpkg: error processing ubuntu-desktop (--remove):
 files list file for package `gnome-user-guide' contains empty filename
dpkg: ../../src/packages.c:252: process_queue: Assertion `!queuelen' failed.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg exited unexpectedly
[root@redbarchetta] 19:42:54 [7]~>

Revision history for this message
Loye Young (loyeyoung) wrote :

Synaptic and update-manager both use apt-get on the backend, so it's expected that all three give you the same behavior.

It looks like you have one or more packages in the dpkg cache that are corrupted, perhaps by an interrupted Internet connection during a download. I suggest cleaning out the cache, updating the available packages, and then reinstalling, which will have the effect of downloading a new package and attempting to install it.

Try this:
~> aptitude clean
~> aptitude update
~> aptitude reinstall amarok-engines

If that doesn't fix the issue, then do this:
~> dpkg --configure -a

Then report back the results of the foregoing.

A bigger issue is why this happened in the first place. Do you know of anything unusual that happened when the packages were originally downloaded?

Revision history for this message
Cory Albrecht (bytor) wrote :

I had already tried what you suggest, albeit with apt-get rather than aptitude. Unofrtunately the same thing still keeps happening. I even tried deleting teh contents of /var/cache/apt, to no avail.

I had also already done the 'dpkg --configure -a', but that prints out nothing when run. :-(

As for anything unusual happening, no, I do not remember. I just clicked on the update icon when it appeared, then on install updates, typed my password inin to gksu, and let things go from there..

Revision history for this message
Cory Albrecht (bytor) wrote :

OK,I found a link (finally!) that helped with my problem:

       http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=591910

I did the mv gnome-user-data.list to another name and tried an 'apt-get purge gnome-user-data' and this time it was the list file for gnome-terminal-data which was the offender with the empty filename.

So I tried to purge gnome-terminal-data and got yet another file. I tracked back through 4 packages and had to move their *.list files. (I assume that rm'ing them would have been equally as effective). Then 'apt-get install ...' on all of them plus any associated packages mentioned that would uninstalled along with the one I specifically gave on the purge command lines, just to make sure, though all reported that they were already installed. After all that, UpdateManager then worked.

However, unlike the poster of that ubuntuforums article, I did not have any garbled data. All the *.list files that I had to move were syntacticly correct shell scripts, but since I don't know the Debian package system at all (I'm a BSD person, only recently into Linux) I don't know if they were logically correct.

What I don't get is that when I tried to download & (re)install gnome-user-guide with Synaptic and with apt-get that the *.list file wasn't nuked so that it would be recreated from the .deb. That way I would have right away been give the error message with a *different* package name, causing me to try and re-install that package, and so forth back through the chain. That would have made things *so* much less frustrating.

Revision history for this message
Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel) wrote :

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 108189, so it is being marked as such. Please look at the other bug report to see if there is any missing information that you can provide, or to see if there is a workaround for the bug. Additionally, any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Feel free to continue to report any other bugs you may find.

Changed in synaptic:
status: New → Confirmed
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