Thanks for the pointers. Yes, of course all apt commands are always executed as root.

Right now it is not so much about the bug that prevents purging, it is more that I just can't reinstall x2goserver anymore. I see this message

"X2Go is configured to use a non-SQLite DB backend, leaving the database alone"
and the server install fails.

and can't find any documentation and reference to it, it is a show stopper at this moment.

Question: Where is x2go told to do that? Which config is still left on the system? I cleaned up EVERYTHING x2go related, erased all dirs and configs, I have never seen this message before. It is like apt / dpkg remembers some setting that it is not supposed to remember (as the package was purged)

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 4:07 PM, Jason Heeris <jason.heeris@gmail.com> wrote:

On 14 March 2018 at 09:30, Nigra Truo <nigratruo@gmail.com> wrote:
> Purge complained that directories were not empty. Then, after I erased the directories, it complains that they are not there (apt is super annoying at times where you can't get it right, no matter how you try). Now I'm stuck, can't install or deinstall:

Purely for future reference, apt/dpkg expects to be the one managing this directory. If there's extra stuff in it, it'll fail to give you the chance to sort it out or back it up (I think?). If the directory's gone though, it'll be confused, because it's meant to be there if the package is installed, and apt/dpkg is meant to be managing it.

I'm not sure why recreating the directory doesn't help though. Are you doing it as root?

You could also try:

$ sudo dpkg --purge --force-all x2goserver

If that doesn't work, you might need to manually hack on the the removal scripts in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ (the relevant ones start with the package names eg. /var/lib/dpkg/info/x2goserver.postrm) to skip the directory check and run the purge again, or get an x2go dev to send you a modified one.

I'm not an x2go dev, so I can only really give advice on the apt side of things. Hope it helps. They may have other advice.

- Jason

Por sperto kaj lerno ne sufiĉas eterno.