Comment 2 for bug 616911

Ok, I have found the cause of the problem. Yaws could not start because I also had wwwoffled running, which listens on the same ports 8080 and 8443. After I stopped wwwoffled ("/etc/init.d/wwwoffled stop"), I tried again. First attempt failed, but this was because yaws install script tries to do a restart of yaws, which fails when it is not running. Therefore doing a "/etc/init.d/yaws start" before "apt-get purge yaws" allowed it to uninstall smoothly.

I still consider this a usability bug, because for many users like me who want to set up a small home web server and try out all the relevant packages, the installers should check if ports are in use and at least display a warning, automatically fall over to a new port number, or prompt the user for a preferred port number.

The way it is now, it fails to install in such a way that it also fails to uninstall, and you have to hunt around for the cause just to even get rid of the package.

Now that I know the cause of the problem, I will probably reinstall yaws at some later time (when I finish my Masters) :-)