[ale] Any debian experts? How do I forcibly remove something that isn't installed.

[Jason Lunz]

ale_nospam at fayettedigital.com said:
> I tried to install a package that needed a newer version of libc.  It 

You don't want to mix packages from different distributions. If you're
lucky, the package you want is on backports.org. If not, the safest
thing is to backport the package yourself, but that's not always easy.

IMO, it's less dangerous to simply run unstable than it is to force
packages into "stable" that weren't meant for it, then expect the result
to be sane3.

> didn't install but now something appears to be hosed.  No matter what I 
> try to install, remove etc, I get the following message.
>
> Removing libapache2-mod-ifier ...
> This module is already disabled, or does not exist!
> dpkg: error processing libapache2-mod-ifier (--remove):
>  subprocess post-removal script returned error exit status 1
> Errors were encountered while processing:
>  libapache2-mod-ifier
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

this means the postrm script for this package failed. The package
scripts are all in /var/lib/dpkg/info. If you edit
/var/lib/dpkg/info/libapache2-mod-ifier.postrm and ensure it exits with
status 0, the package will uninstall cleanly as far as dpkg is
concerned.

You might want to read the postrm script to see what's actually failing
and possibly handle it.

Jason