Upgrading qmail from 1.03-38 to 1.06-5

Question

I'm in a bit of a pickle. I tried to upgrade a chroot'ed environment and it seems I broke dpkg in the process.

I don't know if the cause of the problems is that apt-get isn't able to handle a qmail upgrade or if it's something else (it seems snmpd also didn't "finish" during the last round).

I think the error I'm trying to address is:

E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

It seems I have a very old version of qmail, and upgrading to the one in my apt mirror is too much of a change. I've googled, and have not been able to find anything between 1.03-38 and 1.06-5 yet.

(Removed a few lines and struggled with the formatting)

# apt-get install qmail

The following extra packages will be installed:
  qmail-run qmail-uids-gids
Suggested packages:
  dot-forward qmail-tools
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  qmail-run qmail-uids-gids
The following packages will be upgraded:
  qmail
1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
107 not fully installed or removed.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
Get:1 http://10.105.176.67/debian/ wheezy/main snmpd i386 5.4.3~dfsg-2.8+deb7u1 [964 kB]
Fetched 964 kB in 0s (6,685 kB/s)
Can not write log, openpty() failed (/dev/pts not mounted?)
(Reading database ... 1852018 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace qmail 1.03-38 (using .../archives/qmail_1.06-5_i386.deb) ...
Upgrading from qmail version 1.03-38 is not yet supported.
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail_1.06-5_i386.deb (--unpack):
 subprocess new pre-installation script returned error exit status 1
rmdir: failed to remove `/var/lib/qmail': Directory not empty
insserv: warning: script 'K01qmail' missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: warning: script 'qmail' missing LSB tags and overrides
dpkg: regarding .../qmail-uids-gids_1.06-5_all.deb containing qmail-uids-gids:
 qmail conflicts with qmail-uids-gids
  qmail-uids-gids (version 1.06-5) is to be installed.

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail-uids-gids_1.06-5_all.deb (--unpack):
 conflicting packages - not installing qmail-uids-gids
dpkg: regarding .../qmail-run_2.0.2_all.deb containing qmail-run:
 qmail-run conflicts with mail-transport-agent
  qmail provides mail-transport-agent and is present and installed.

dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail-run_2.0.2_all.deb (--unpack):
 conflicting packages - not installing qmail-run
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail_1.06-5_i386.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail-uids-gids_1.06-5_all.deb
 /var/cache/apt/archives/qmail-run_2.0.2_all.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 20 '19 at 21:34

I just ran this:

dpkg --configure -a

At least this got me past this problem/error with dpkg. I desperately needed to install a custom deb package.

I was getting a lot of these messages when trying to install my custom deb package:

mycustompackage depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.1t-1+deb7u1); however:
  Package libssl1.0.0:i386 is not configured yet.

I'm guessing my last batch of patching somehow ended with an error and dpkg wouldn't let me do anything else.

My qmail (and probably snmpd) problem remains, but I just needed to "fix" dpkg for now.

Upgrading qmail from 1.03-38 to 1.06-5

1 Answers1