smbfs, samba & samba-common are uninstallable

[George Bromell]

Binary package hint: smbfs

My first time reporting a bug so forgive me if this is th ewrong format, forum or insufficient details. After a fresh install of ubuntu 8.10 gnome desktop x86_64 edition I attempted to install smbfs and received the following error;
$ sudo apt-get install smbfs
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.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
  smbfs: Depends: samba-common (= 2:3.2.3-1ubuntu3) but 2:3.2.3-1ubuntu3.4 is to be installed
E: Broken packages

Attempting to install samba-common results in the following error;
$ sudo apt-get install samba-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
samba-common is already the newest version.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  linux-headers-2.6.27-7 linux-headers-2.6.27-7-generic
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
Package: yelp 2.24.0-0ubuntu2
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_NZ.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: yelp
Uname: Linux 2.6.27-11-generic x86_64

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Looks like package information is out of sync... You should refresh package info in Update Manager, apply updates, then try installing smbfs again.

[George Bromell (george-bromell)]

Thanks for replying to this bug Thierry. I did also try installing these packages using Synaptic, after refreshing the package info, but received the same error message. I have now successfully installed samba by using aptitude, which issues the same error but offers to resolve this by down grading the already installed samba-common package to 2:3.2.3-1ubuntu3. While I now have a working samba server I believe that there is a problem with the dependency specification for these packages i.e. the install should be allowed to proceed if the user has a later version of the required package.

[Thierry Carrez (ttx)]

Well, it should be allowed to proceed only if you are sure that smbfs will work with all later versions of libsmbclient, which might not be the case.

Anyway, the problem here seems to be that you enabled -updates or -security at one point, got samba common...-1ubuntu3.4 installed. Then -updates or -security were disabled and you were left with only the release packages... So installing smbfs would try to install -1ubuntu3.

I'll close this as Invalid since you solved it. I'd recommend adding the -security repository again, apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to get all the packages at the -1ubuntu3.4 level.