[Bug 372526] [NEW] synaptic results in bad installs

[quixote]

Public bug reported:

I'm not enough of an expert to know why this problem is happening,
whether it relates to backports or just plain jaunty, or which aspect of
synaptic is involved. It seems serious enough to need some expert
attention, so that's why the bug report.  My system is a Core 2 Duo
P8400 2.26GHz, 3GB RAM, Intel GMA X4500 graphics, running Jaunty and
Intrepid in a dual boot setup.

I upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04, which went fine, and started installing
other programs using Synaptic (Thunderbird, vlc, etc.). (At that point,
it was all Jaunty.)  The install failed, and when I rebooted I was told
to run fsck.  There were a few hundred bad inodes and god-knows-what-
all.  The system came back up.  Things seemed okay, and I continued
customizing.  Same problem, only this time gdm blew up and I wound up
having to do a clean install, which was and is a major pain.

I figured I had a failing hard drive, and replaced it.  I started over,
installed a few things with apt-get, No problem.  Then I used Synaptic
to install Firefox 3.5.  Error messages about a lack of xulrunner-1.9 in
/usr/bin.  The program itself was there, but the link was missing.
Also, was again told to run fsck on startup and had a few dozen bad
inodes and whatnot.  Once the system was back up,  I put the xulrunner
link in by hand.  No more error messages.  Then I tried Thunderbird
again, and Synaptic again didn't put a link in /usr/bin, desktop
integration was bad, and the program wouldn't start.

I used the command line dpkg to purge it and reinstalled with apt-get.
No problems.

That's when I started to think Synaptic had been the source of all my
problems.  I've since installed using apt-get in terminal: vlc, gthumb,
ufraw, which all have lists of dependencies as long as your arm, and
they all installed without a hitch.  No problems on bootup either.

Assuming this issue isn't somehow unique to me, I hope this helps track
down what it is.

** Affects: jaunty-backports
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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synaptic results in bad installs
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/372526
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