Perl won't install because it depends on the wrong perl-base

[Sjoerd Langkemper]

Pretty clean Xenial install on a Docker environment. I try installing apache2, which fails because it can't install perl. If I try to install perl:

# apt-get install perl
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 perl : Depends: perl-base (= 5.22.1-9) but 5.22.1-9ubuntu0.2 is to be installed
        Recommends: netbase but it is not going to be installed
        Recommends: rename but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

# dpkg -l perl*
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-=================================-=====================-=====================-=======================================================================
un perl <none> <none> (no description available)
ii perl-base 5.22.1-9ubuntu0.2 amd64 minimal Perl system
un perl-modules <none> <none> (no description available)
un perlapi-5.22.1 <none> <none> (no description available)

# cat /etc/apt/sources.list | grep -v '^#'

deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial main restricted

deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-updates main restricted
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-updates main restricted

deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial universe
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial universe
deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-updates universe
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-updates universe

deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-security main restricted
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-security main restricted
deb http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-security universe
deb-src http://ftp.nluug.nl/os/Linux/distr/ubuntu/ xenial-security universe

[Sjoerd Langkemper (sjoerd-launchpad)]

This is solved by using another mirror. I emailed the NLUUG ftp administrator about this.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu better.

Could you check if this issue persists if you run `sudo apt update`? Might be some package information which is slightly out of sync causing this issue.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Closing this based on your comment, good to hear the issue was resolved. Might have been the mirror was temporarily out of sync.