Emacs installation fails on Ubuntu 20.04

Question

I am trying to simply do:

sudo apt install emacs

on Ubuntu 20.04.

The result is that it appears there is an error installing emacsen-common in emacs-gtk which is ultimately a dependency of all of emacs. The error I am seeing is:

Setting up emacs-gtk (1:26.3+1-1ubuntu2) ...
Install emacsen-common for emacs
emacsen-common: Handling install of emacsen flavor emacs
emacs: error while loading shared libraries: libotf.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
ERROR: install script from emacsen-common package failed
dpkg: error processing package emacs-gtk (--configure):
 installed emacs-gtk package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of emacs:
 emacs depends on emacs-gtk (>= 1:26.3) | emacs-lucid (>= 1:26.3) | emacs-nox (>= 1:26.3); however:
  Package emacs-gtk is not configured yet.
  Package emacs-lucid is not installed.
  Package emacs-nox is not installed.

dpkg: error processing package emacs (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
No apport report written because the error message indicates its a followup error from a previous failure.
Errors were encountered while processing:
 emacs-gtk
 emacs
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

I am hoping to get some ideas around how to fix this.

Solution

To fix this, I first did sudo apt purge emacs.

I then reinstalled libotf0 and libm17n-0, using:

sudo apt install --reinstall libotf0 libm17n-0

after that, sudo apt install emacs worked as expected.

Comments

[LyteFM]

I ran into the same issue. No idea how to properly install emacs yet, but managed to get apt into a normal state by running sudo dpkg --remove --force-remove-reinstreq for each package with unmet dependencies.

[sanimalp]

I managed to fix this by running sudo apt install --reinstall libotf0 libm17n-0 after purging emacs.. no idea why it works. but it does.

[LyteFM]

Nice, that worked for me too.