Empathy removed by update

[rmotters]

I had a similar problem last night. I worked out the problem was down to me having emapthy installed from the telepthy ppa (https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa) loaded.

This was updated to a new version of empathy, a couple of days ago. This change of version caused the indicator-applet to have a problem, cuase it requires the library from v2.28 as a dependancy.

I spent the night installing and removeing empathy and trying to get my system back to normal. In the end I had lost the indicator applet, the fast-switch applet and empathy would not work at all. I chose to backup my home directory and re-install the OS.

[David Oxland]

Looks that is what I'm up against.
Here's the output of my latest attempt and you can see that there is a conflict.

david@david-desktop:~$ sudo aptitude install ubuntu-desktop package
[sudo] password for david:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Couldn't find package "package", and more than 40
packages contain "package" in their name.
Couldn't find package "package", and more than 40
packages contain "package" in their name.
The following packages are BROKEN:
libempathy30
The following NEW packages will be installed:
empathy empathy-common{a} firefox-gnome-support ttf-indic-fonts-core
ttf-lao ttf-thai-tlwg ttf-unfonts-core ttf-wqy-zenhei ubuntu-desktop
The following packages will be REMOVED:
libempathy-common{a} libsofia-sip-ua-glib3{u} libsofia-sip-ua0{u}
python-papyon{u} python-telepathy{u} telepathy-butterfly{u}
telepathy-core{u} telepathy-haze{u} telepathy-sofiasip{u}
0 packages upgraded, 9 newly installed, 9 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 17.1MB/19.7MB of archives. After unpacking 34.6MB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libempathy30: Depends: libempathy-common (= 2.28.1.1-1+ppa9.10+1) but it is not installable
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

Keep the following packages at their current version:
empathy [Not Installed]
empathy-common [Not Installed]
libempathy-common [2.28.1.1-1+ppa9.10+1 (karmic, now)]

Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
ubuntu-desktop recommends empathy
Score is -1

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I guess this should be reported as a bug to Empathy or Ubuntu?

[Mornedhel]

As others have said, the problem stems from your using the Empathy PPA. When a PPA breaks dependencies and a dist-upgrade asks to remove packages that should obviously not be removed (e.g. Empathy, in your case), you should either not proceed with the upgrade, or temporarily remove the PPA from your sources.

Since you already went ahead with the upgrade, I recommend you comment the Empathy PPA in your sources.list, reinstall what is needed, then re-add the PPA but don't do dist-upgrades (only upgrades) until the devs solve their dependency problem and the PPA is back to a consistent state.

[David Oxland]

Thanks Mornedhel
I understand now.
Empathy seems to be restored to it's operating state and I've rigged up a Stop button so I'm happy.
I've not uncommented the PPA yet; tempted to leave it commented out for a month or two (as long as it's working), so I don't make a mistake and mess it up again.