Broken symlink renders gnome-applets uninstallable on (my) dapper

[Rocco Stanzione]

Today's apt-get upgrade left me with this:

Unpacking replacement gnome-applets ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/update-gconf-defaults", line 56, in ?
    fd=open(defaults_dir+'/'+f)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu'
dpkg: warning - old post-removal script returned error exit status 1
dpkg - trying script from the new package instead ...
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/update-gconf-defaults", line 56, in ?
    fd=open(defaults_dir+'/'+f)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu'
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/gnome-applets_2.14.0-0ubuntu5_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess new post-removal script returned error exit status 1
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/update-gconf-defaults", line 56, in ?
    fd=open(defaults_dir+'/'+f)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu'
dpkg: error while cleaning up:
 subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/gnome-applets_2.14.0-0ubuntu5_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

caused by /usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu being a broken symlink

[Rocco Stanzione (trappist)]

On closer examination, that was the output of my attempt to remove gnome-applets, but the tracebacks were the same on installation. Incidentally I worked around the problem by saying:
sudo ln -sf /usr/share/edubuntu-artwork/gconf/default /usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

"caused by /usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu being a broken symlink"

that is probably shipped by edubuntu-artwork, reassigning

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

hmm, usually this codesnippet from postrm should remove the symlink

if [ -L /usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu ]; then
    rm /usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu
fi

which version of edubuntu-artwork do/did you have installed ?

[Rocco Stanzione (trappist)]

iU edubuntu-artwork 0.1.0-18 edubuntu themes and artwork

That means it's uninstalled? that would explain some of it.

[Oliver Grawert (ogra)]

iU means its installed and a new version was unpacked, upper case letters there usually mean something bad ...

there should be 0.1.0-20 in the archive already, please update to that one and check if the symplink is ok afterwards

[Rocco Stanzione (trappist)]

Looks like that got caught in today's apt-get upgrade:
/usr/share/gconf/defaults/20-edubuntu -> /usr/share/edubuntu-artwork/gconf/young
is not the symlink I made

[Rocco Stanzione (trappist)]

Tried to remove edubuntu-artwork to see if I'd be left with the dead symlink. The uninstall failed (new bug on that package) but not before the above-mentioned part of the postrm script removed the symlink. Closing this one.