Thursday 6 October 2016

Fixing broken Debian packages

In my job we make use of Vidyo for videoconferencing, but today I ran into an issue after re-imaging my Ubuntu 16.04 desktop.

The latest version of vidyodesktop requires libqt4-gui, which doesn't exist in Ubuntu anymore. This always seems to be a problem with non-free software targeting multiple versions of multiple operating systems.

You can work around the issue, doing something like:

sudo dpkg -i --ignore-depends=libqt4-gui VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb

but then you get the dreaded unmet dependencies roadblock which prevents you from future package manager updates and operations. i.e.

You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
 vidyodesktop : Depends: libqt4-gui (>= 4.8.1) but it is not installable
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

It's a known problem, and it's been well documented. The suggested solution was to modify the VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb package, but I didn't want to do that (because when the next version comes out, it will need to be handraulicly fixed too - and that's an ongoing burden I'm not prepared to live with). So I went looking for another solution - and found Debian's equivs package (and thanks to tonyb for pointing me in the right direction!)

So what we want to do is to create a dummy Debian package that will satisfy the libqt4-gui requirement.  So first off, let's uninstall vidyodesktop, and install equivs:

sudo apt-get -f install
sudo apt-get install equivs

Next, let's make a fake package:

mkdir -p ~/src/fake-libqt4-gui
cd  ~/src/fake-libqt4-gui
cat << EOF > fake-libqt4-gui
Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: libqt4-gui
Version: 1:100
Maintainer: Michael Davies <michael@the-davies.net>
Architecture: all
Description: fake libqt4-gui to keep vidyodesktop happy
EOF

And now, let's build and install the dummy package:

equivs-build fake-libqt4-gui
sudo dpkg -i libqt4-gui_100_all.deb

And now vidyodesktop installs cleanly!

sudo dpkg -i VidyoDesktopInstaller-*.deb

1 comment:

  1. To follow-up from some private email and IRCs, the libqt4-gui package isn't actually needed per se, although other bits of the QT are. So in this case, creating the 'equiv' dummy package fixes the dependency issue, and doesn't affect functionality.

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