Comment 18 for bug 1236951

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