curious apt question (not a support question)

okay, first is what happened when I installed an official package: I tried to install Burg, and it became broken, and wouldn't be fixed by checking install, nor could it be removed (not even forcibly) I couldn't install anything new, so in essence, apt was permanently broken. the only fix for that is reinstalling the distro (my case, I had to reinstall Kubuntu 11.10)

what I'm asking is, has anyone here broken a package management system (such as apt) to the point it can only be fixed by reinstalling the distro?

P.S. if this is in the wrong place, please move it to where it should be.

hi c_smith

Can't say I have ever broken a package management system like APT and had to reinstall... i've had broken updates
in APT before but I remember it was quite easy to fix in the commandline.... been a long time since i've used APT... but yer... Can't say i've had
a package that I couldn't remove...... you could of manually removed the binary/folders for it though... dunno if this would of fixed the problem or not...

cheers for the post

thanx
kaddy

well, I went on the Ubuntu support channel on freenode, and they told me the easiest way is reinstalling, which I did. I could have gone and deleted everything, but I doubt I would have found it all, apt-get was pointing to a script for uninstallation that was throwing some error, I had no clue where it was, but since I reinstalled, I actually got to reset some compiz configurations that went awry. and being as my /home folder is on a seperate partition, everything in that directory was safe when I replaced.