How to purge completly a broken MySQL

[stan]

On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 02:46:53PM -0500, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 02:41:20PM -0500, stan wrote:
> > 
> > How can I force a complete purge of this package?
> 
> apt-get purge ....
> 
> AFAIK, that will remove all remnants of the original installation.
> 

root at boo-boo:/etc/mysql# apt-get purge  mysql-server-5.0  
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package mysql-server-5.0 is not installed, so not removed

Yet,

root at boo-boo:/etc/mysql# apt-get install mysql-server-5.0 

Fails with.
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up mysql-server-5.0 (5.0.67-0ubuntu6) ...
 * Stopping MySQL database server mysqld                                 [
 OK ] 
 /var/lib/dpkg/info/mysql-server-5.0.postinst: line 143:
 /etc/mysql/conf.d/old_passwords.cnf: No such file or directory
 dpkg: error processing mysql-server-5.0 (--configure):
  subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 1
  Errors were encountered while processing:
   mysql-server-5.0
   E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

So, that did not, somehow get me back to where no traces of the original
install exits.

-- 
One of the main causes of the fall of the roman empire was that, lacking
zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C
programs.