Comment 16 for bug 108189

Revision history for this message
Philipp Bönhof (phboe-launchpad) wrote :

Hi,
I had similar problems after new installation of Ubuntu 8.04.

My error message was:
dpkg: serious warning: files list file for package `*' missing, assuming package has no files currently installed.

For * being several installed packages eg. python-conf, xserver-xorg-video-ati and so on.
In /var/lib/dpkg/info/ I really found that the *.list files for those packages were missing.

But the packages really seemed to be installed, because a "sudo apt-get install python-conf" would tell that it is installed.
For the same reason "sudo apt-get -f install" did not work as well.

The only option I had was to trick apt-get to spit out the tentatively missing packages again:
sudo apt-get --reinstall <some installed package>

With this you can build up a command to reinstall all such broken packages:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install $(echo y | sudo apt-get --reinstall install python-conf | grep "dpkg:" | grep -o "\`.*'" | sed "s/[\`']//g")

Unfortunately there are cyclic dependencies between some of these packages and also other conflicts while reinstalling.
A work around would be to add in a "| head -n20" before the ')' to only install the first 20 of the list. And then run the whole command repeatedly.