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[Derek Broughton]

Glenn R Williams wrote:

> It may have removed then reinstalled it. It stopped being listed as broken
> and is currently installed. Maybe it was a fleeting packaging problem.
> 
> On Sunday 28 September 2008 08:54:19 Derek Broughton wrote:
>> Glenn R Williams wrote:
>> > I went into Synaptic and told it to "Fix broken packages"". It said it
>> > could not install the libc6-686 package, but then it seemed to and when
>> > I rebooted I was able to install the other updates and things are back
>> > to normal. (Synaptic is part of Ubuntu GNOME, but seemed to do the
>> > trick).

fwiw, it's exactly the same as "aptitude -f install" or "apt-get -f install"

>> It might have actually removed it - you don't have to have libc6-i686,
>> but
>> it provides optimizations over the base libc6.  Check, and if it's not
>> installed, you should now be able to reinstall it.

There is always an issue with anything that upgrades libc6-i686, because if
libc6 gets upgraded and libc6-686 hasn't yet been (or vice-versa) the
system can be nearly irretrievably broken.  So there's a system in place to
defer the actual changes until it's safe to do so, but it seems to be not
quite rock-solid yet.  But at least it doesn't completely break the OS.
-- 
derek