I was stuck the other day trying to update the Debian packages. libvisual0.2 wouldn’t install beacuase the library file (or one of the links) was also in libvisual0. Even if I tried to remove libvisual0 with aptitude or apt-get, it wouldn’t go away, because there was a current install broken.

Luckily there was a solution.

# dpkg -r libvisual0

I haven’t dug into Debian package management too much (yet?), but I suppose dpkg operates on a level that doesn’t care about dependencies and install states. Which in this case was extremely useful.

As usual, it took me quite a few hours to figure this one out.