this cleared out a lot of the easy to hit cruft with no dependency issues.
Then I finished off by hitting what i could with specific called out dependencies listed as well. Ended up with a short set of packages that COULD NOT BE REMOVED.
I think I spotted a circular dependency in texlive / latex:
Got around my foul up in a REALLY ugly manner.
started with a couple iterations of :
dpkg -l | grep texlive | awk '{print $2}' | sort | xargs dpkg -r
this cleared out a lot of the easy to hit cruft with no dependency issues.
Then I finished off by hitting what i could with specific called out dependencies listed as well. Ended up with a short set of packages that COULD NOT BE REMOVED.
I think I spotted a circular dependency in texlive / latex:
http:// paste.openstack .org/show/ 116132/
would not be the first time ubuntu has fucked up and let one of those into their mainline.
Anyway I ended up hitting all four of those with a scary ass
dpkg --force-depends -P for the four of those packages.
That left me ready to resume with an apt-get -f install