2006-06-18 Randall Lucas
If you get stuck with a half-uninstalled (technically “half-installed;” the debian dpkg system is an optimist, I guess) package that barfs on running its postrm (post-removal) script with something like:
"dpkg-divert: mismatch on divert-to ..."
This can sometimes be fixed, or at least made to shut up, by finding the appropriate line in /var/lib/dpkg/info/PACKAGE.postrm and editing it to reflect the right filenames for the dpkg-divert remove line.
If you really need to get down and dirty (like, if the removal of a non-critical package is stuck halfway and that is stopping you from doing an installation of a really necessary package), you could just comment out that whole bit with the goal of getting the postrm script to return success (0).
Of course, if you’re running any important services, you shouldn’t be using “unstable” or Ubuntu; just run Debian stable so you can sleep at night.