[vox-tech] aptitude failue Could not early remove e2fsprogs

[Troy Arnold]

On Thu, Sep 08, 2005 at 04:54:32PM -0700, Donald Greg McGahan wrote:
> A debian install in VMware is refusing to behave.
> Below is the end of the aptitude output.
> 
> 663 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 79 not upgraded.
> Need to get 0B/466MB of archives. After unpacking 34.0MB will be used.
> Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
> E: This installation run will require temporarily removing the essential
> package e2fsprogs due to a Conflicts/Pre-Depends loop. This is often bad,
> but if you really want to do it, activate the APT::Force-LoopBreak option.
> E: Internal Error, Could not early remove e2fsprogs
> Ack!  Something bad happened while installing packages.  Trying to recover:
> Reading Package Lists... Done
> Building Dependency Tree
> Reading extended state information
> Initializing package states... Done
> Reading task descriptions... Done
> Norse:/#
> I'm stumped and apparently my googling skills are wierded today.
> Any ideas? and Thanks in advance.
> D.G. aka "DiG" McGahan

I searched bugs.debian.org for e2fsprogs and found this:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=325834
#325834: apt-get install e2fsprogs get a Conflicts Pre-Depends loop
error

The problem in that thread is that the person was attempting to update
more than one Debian release.  woody->sid, instead of woody->sarge->sid.

-troy