Debian – How to Fix Held Broken Packages

aptdebian

I want to begin exploring moving myself away from google apps, because it's expensive, and it looks like citadel has all of the groupware functions I need. So I am trying to install citadel-suite with:

apt-get install citadel-suite

But it returns:

citadel-suite: depends: citadel-mta but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Well, yes. It does require citadel-mta. That's half the point. So why is it not going to be installed? What broken packages do I have held? Why are they broken? Why are they held? I didn't hold them. Or break them, for that matter.

The problem with apt-get is that, for the 10 years I have been using it, it has, to borrow an Apple phrase, just worked. Now that it isn't, I'm rather at a loss. I did try the -f switch, but it didn't help. I haven't made any modifications to /etc/apt/sources.list, so I can't revert them. What should I try next?

Best Answer

"... But it is not going to be installed" generally means that a serious dependency conflict will ensue if it's allowed to go on.

Try the following command: 

aptitude why-not citadel-mta

why-not basically checks dependencies and returns the reasons it would have to not fill a particular dependency automatically.

In the case of my system at home:

shadur@leviathan:~$ aptitude why-not citadel-mta
i   exim4-daemon-light Conflicts mail-transport-agent
p   citadel-mta        Provides  mail-transport-agent

Apparently citadel-mta is a full-on MTA and will therefore replace whatever mail-transport-agent package you currently have installed. Explicitly telling it to install citadel-mta as well should be enough to break the deadlock.

NOTE: Doing so means your current mail server software will be replaced by the one that comes with citadel. Make very sure that that's what you want before you do this.

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