dpkg and emacs mutually exclusive

[Noel J. Bergman]

The current update to dpkg is held up for me by emacs. If I try to force dpkg to install, it wants to remove emacs. If I try to install both:

$ sudo apt-get install dpkg emacs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
emacs is already the newest version.
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:
  dpkg: Breaks: emacs22 (<= 22.3+1-1)
E: Broken packages

I have emacs 22.2-0ubuntu3. dpkg wants to go from 1.15.3.1ubuntu1 to 1.15.4ubuntu1

[Thorsten (kdefan)]

The most recent update to my Kubuntu Karmic AMD64 installation simply removed emacs22. It can't be reinstalled without removing tons of essential core packages. emacs22-nox or emacs22-gtk can't be installed, either. Basically, there is no emacs for the latest Karmic. This emacs user considers this an extremely serious bug.

[Xavier Gnata (xavier-gnata-gmail)]

Same bug on my box:

"the following packages have unmet dependencies:
  emacs22: Depends: emacs22-bin-common (= 22.2-0ubuntu3) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libasound2 (> 1.0.18) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libice6 (>= 1:1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libsm6 but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libxmu6 but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: libxt6 but it is not going to be installed
           Depends: xaw3dg (>= 1.5+E-1) but it is not going to be installed
  libc6: Depends: tzdata but it is not going to be installed"

Well all these packages *are* installed.

"http://archive.ubuntu.com karmic/main libice6 2:1.0.5-1" has for instance to be updated.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I guess the easiest way to fix this is probably to merge emacs23 from Debian testing or unstable. The current Karmic dpkg is marked to break emacs22 <= 22.3+1-1. Assigning high priority since both dpkg and emacs are pretty essential packages.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

subscribing main sponsors to get an opinion about the proposal to merge from Debian

[Thorsten (kdefan)]

Yes! Upgrading to emacs23 would be a good idea, even without this specific issue.

[Matthias Klose (doko)]

has to be fixed in dpkg.

filed bug #433397 for a FFe/sync of emacs23 to karmic/universe

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package dpkg - 1.15.4ubuntu2

---------------
dpkg (1.15.4ubuntu2) karmic; urgency=low

  * dpkg: Adjust versioned emacs22 conflicts. LP: #432584.

 -- Matthias Klose <email address hidden> Sun, 20 Sep 2009 10:08:33 +0200

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Sorry about that. I meant to adjust this before uploading dpkg previously, but forgot ...