[Bash-completion-devel] Bug#491457: bash-completion: trying to overwrite `/etc/bash_completion', which is also in package bash

[Tim Connors]

Package: bash-completion
Version: 20080705
Severity: normal

I have two systems running sid which couldn't install the latest
bash-completion, with:

> sudo apt-get install bash
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
bash is already the newest version.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  bash-completion
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  bash-completion
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 18 not upgraded.
81 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/89.2kB of archives.
After this operation, 459kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? 
Reading package fields... Done
Reading package status... Done
Retrieving bug reports... Done
Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done
(Reading database ... 134061 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking bash-completion (from .../bash-completion_20080705_all.deb) ...
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/bash-completion_20080705_all.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite `/etc/bash_completion', which is also in package bash
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/bash-completion_20080705_all.deb
[ Rootkit Hunter version 1.3.2 ]
File updated: searched for 154 files, found 136
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)


One of them seemed to fix itself when I did a purge of
bash_completion, and then reinstalled the same latest version in sid.
The other hasn't.  I just tracked it down to it still being listed as
a conffile in /var/lib/dpkg/status for the bash package.  Should there
be a method in one of the packages to clear the conffile status from
the bash package and let bash-completion take it over?


-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.25 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU, LC_CTYPE=en_AU (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages bash-completion depends on:
ii  bash                          3.2-4      The GNU Bourne Again SHell

bash-completion recommends no packages.

bash-completion suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information