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HippoMan
Asked: 2022-01-13 19:58:55 +0800 CST

Xubuntu: "desktop-file-utils" stopped being able to be installed

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After doing some package installs, the desktop-file-utils package is now failing to be installed via apt and aptitude. This is for Xubuntu 20.04.2.

When running apt, I now always get this error:

dpkg: error processing package desktop-file-utils (--configure):
 installed desktop-file-utils package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
 desktop-file-utils

I know that I can purge this package, but then quite a few of its dependencies will also be uninstalled, and my system is likely to become unusable.

I don't understand what could have caused this problem, because I don't know what I could have done to affect this package.

Is there some way to fix this other than purging desktop-file-utils and making my system unusable? Also, is there some way where I can get more detailed information about exactly how the post-installation script is failing? If so, perhaps I could debug this.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

apt

2 Answers

  1. Let's fix this error step by step.

    1. First, run force install to know the exact problem:

      sudo apt --fix-broken install

    2. Identify the error:

      Errors were encountered while processing:
desktop-file-utils

    3. Mark dependencies as manually installed to prevent them from getting removed;

       sudo apt-mark manual libglib2.0-0 libc6

    4. Remove the post-installation files:

      sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/desktop-file-utils* ~/

    5. Purge the package:

      sudo dpkg -P --force-all desktop-file-utils

    6. Re-install the package (Optional):

      sudo aptitude -f install desktop-file-utils

    Explanation

    As the error message states:

    installed desktop-file-utils package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1

    This usually implies that there are transient issues in the post-installation files.

    • In the first step, we executed a command that attempted to correct the mistakes.

    • In step three, we deleted the package's post-installation files.

    • We purged the package in step four to remove any configuration files.

    • In step five, we reinstalled the package to make sure it didn't break any other packages.

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  2. Best Answer

    It turns out that this has nothing to do with packages nor with the apt system.

    I discovered that I had accidentally set XDG_DATA_DIRS to point to a non-existent directory.

    Once I fixed this, the problem went away.

    Here are more details as to why this fixed the problem ...

    These are the contents of /var/lib/dpkg/info/desktop-file-utils.postinst ...

    #!/bin/sh

set -e

update-desktop-database -q

if [ "$1" = "triggered" ]; then
    exit 0
fi

    I ran update-desktop-database -q from the command line, and it didn't give any output, but it exited with a non-zero return code.

    I ran it again like this: update-desktop-database -v. This time, it gave an error message which stated that the applications subdirectory of the path that is contained in XDG_DATA_DIRS didn't exist. This showed me that I had set XDG_DATA_DIRS incorrectly.

    Once I reset XDG_DATA_DIRS to a proper value, the update-desktop-database command started exiting with a zero return code, and the desktop-file-utils error in apt that I mentioned above stopped occurring.

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