Can't install emacs on freshly installed ubuntu-24.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso

[Liam Proven]

On Tue, 12 Nov 2024 at 00:58, Josef Wolf <jw at raven.inka.de> wrote:
>
>   The following packages have unmet dependencies:

I had problems like this. (I was trying to install WINE but it's not important.)

I was not able to troubleshoot at the time but found the cause
accidentally much later.

My `/etc/apt/sources.list` file was bad. *All* repositories were commented out.

But, because I had lots of other repos, I got updates almost every
day, and everything looked normal. The files were quite long with lots
of comments... in fact they were *all* comments, which I only found
using an editor that syntax-highlighted them.

It was like this on several machines, too, but I do sometimes copy
partitions around. It had been so for a long time, months to years,
and I never noticed.

I found a known-good machine, copied just the relevant lines, and it
worked... and I had a *lot* of updates. Over a gigabyte.

The APT subsystem was oblivious. I could choose and change mirrors and
so on, and it claimed it worked. I suspected nothing.

If I were more skilled in Python I'd write an apt-lint or apt-ck tool
to sanity-check sources.list -- make sure it points to all the basic
repos, make sure it can contact them, that the lines are well-formed,
etc.

-- 
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