Upgrade to 16.04. Broken dependencies and impossibility to resolve them in usual ways

Question

I upgraded the system some days ago and after that I had a problem of broken packages which affects to MySQL and several libraries. After that I can do updates but not install, upgrade, remove or purge packages, and I don’t find any way to resolve the problem of broken dependencies.

I’m not sure whether the problem of the broken dependencies and of MySQL are directly related or not, then I will try to describe both separately.

First if I try to install a package or make an upgrade, I get following message:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libsasl2-modules:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not installed
skype-bin:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 but it is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

If I use the upgrade -f option then I get

$ sudo apt-get -f upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libssl1.0.0:i386
The following packages will be upgraded:
  snapd
1 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/5,235 kB of archives.
After this operation, 6,545 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
Preconfiguring packages ...
Setting up mysql-common (5.7.12-0ubuntu1.1) ...
update-alternatives: error: alternative path /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback doesn't exist
dpkg: error processing package mysql-common (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-common
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Looking with Synaptic I see following broken packages

libsasl2-modules;i386
skype-bin:i386

Here if I try to remove, reinstall or whatever I get with Synaptic always the same error message

E: mysql-common: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2

If I try to configure MySQL (what is installed theoretically in the newest version) then I get this message:

$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
Setting up mysql-common (5.7.12-0ubuntu1.1) ...
update-alternatives: error: alternative path /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback doesn't exist
dpkg: error processing package mysql-common (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server-5.7:
 mysql-server-5.7 depends on mysql-common (>= 5.6.22-1~); however:
  Package mysql-common is not configured yet.
 mysql-server-5.7 depends on mysql-common (>= 5.5); however:
  Package mysql-common is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package mysql-server-5.7 (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of mysql-server:
 mysql-server depends on mysql-server-5.7; however:
  Package mysql-server-5.7 is not configured yet.

dpkg: error processing package mysql-server (--configure):
 dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-common
 mysql-server-5.7
 mysql-server

In the upgrade of MySQL something were really weird. For instance, looking for the files my.cnf, my.cnf.fallback etc... I realized that the files and their folders don’t exist anymore. I ignore how they disappear during the upgrade.

Trying to reinstall MySQL without any hope I got this messages:

$ sudo apt-get -f install mysql-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
mysql-common is already the newest version (5.7.12-0ubuntu1.1).
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libsasl2-modules:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
 skype-bin:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

If I use purge to deinstall them and begin from scratch, then I have the same problems

$ sudo apt-get purge mysql-common
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree   
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libmysqlclient18 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5) but it is not going to be installed
 libmysqlclient18:i386 : Depends: mysql-common:i386 (>= 5.5)
 libmysqlclient20 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5) but it is not going to be installed
 libsasl2-modules:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
 mysql-client-5.7 : Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.5) but it is not going to be installed
 mysql-server-5.7 : PreDepends: mysql-common (>= 5.5) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: mysql-common (>= 5.6.22-1~) but it is not going to be installed
 skype-bin:i386 : Depends: libssl1.0.0:i386 but it is not going to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

If I try apt-get -f install then I get

$ sudo apt-get -f install
[sudo] password for user: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Correcting dependencies... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  libssl1.0.0:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  libssl1.0.0:i386
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
3 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0 B/949 kB of archives.
After this operation, 3,207 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] Y
Preconfiguring packages ...
Setting up mysql-common (5.7.12-0ubuntu1.1) ...
update-alternatives: error: alternative path /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback doesn't exist
dpkg: error processing package mysql-common (--configure):
 subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
 mysql-common
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Somebody has an idea, what I can do?

Solution

Run the following commands:

mkdir MYSQL
cd MYSQL
sudo apt-get download mysql-common
ar xvf mysql*
tar xvf dat*
sudo cp ./etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback /etc/mysql/my.cnf.fallback
sudo dpkg -i mysql*deb 
cd
sudo apt-get -f install

Comments

[David Foerster]

Did you try the part about circumventing Apt? It took me a few minutes to extend the answer accordingly and you might have missed it. It's the same procedure as mchid's answer.

[KeRo]

Hi David, no... I think I missed this part. Thanks a lot for your help!!

[wind39]

Great! Worked flawlessly.

[jdog]

WOOT. And learned so much

[stamster]

Great. Worked on 16.04 LTS with MariaDB instead of MySQL.