[Techtalk] apt-get hell?

[Katie Bechtold]

I have a question about a problem on my Debian unstable system.

# apt-get upgrade
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
  apache apache-common apache-ssl apache-utils e2fsprogs libgd2
  libpng2 libsasl7 util-linux webalizer xlibs
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not upgraded.

My understanding is that, if I want to upgrade the packages that
have been kept back, I need to 'install' rather than 'upgrade'
them.  (Correct?)  So:

# apt-get install util-linux
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Suggested packages:
  util-linux-locales kbd console-tools dosfstools
The following packages will be upgraded:
  util-linux
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 10 not
upgraded.
Need to get 378kB of archives.
After unpacking 333kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://http.us.debian.org unstable/main util-linux
2.12p-4 [378kB]
Fetched 378kB in 4s (84.2kB/s)                       
dpkg: `update-rc.d' not found on PATH.
dpkg: 1 expected program(s) not found on PATH.
NB: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin,
/usr/sbin and /sbin.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

'dpkg -i util-linux' gives me the same error.

Well, I can't find update-rc.d either.
# cd /
# find . -name "update-rc.d"
#

packages.debian.org tells me that usr/sbin/update-rc.d comes
from packages base/sysv-rc and admin/file-rc (in the unstable
distribution on i386), which aren't installed on my system:

# dpkg -l sysv-rc
#
# dpkg -l file-rc
#

# apt-get --ignore-missing install sysv-rc
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Suggested packages:
  sysv-rc-conf
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  sysv-rc
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not
upgraded.
Need to get 0B/35.3kB of archives.
After unpacking 197kB of additional disk space will be
used.
dpkg: `update-rc.d' not found on PATH.
dpkg: 1 expected program(s) not found on PATH.
NB: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin,
/usr/sbin and /sbin.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

# apt-get --ignore-missing install file-rc
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  file-rc
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 11 not
upgraded.
Need to get 0B/36.3kB of archives.
After unpacking 193kB of additional disk space will be
used.
dpkg: `update-rc.d' not found on PATH.
dpkg: 1 expected program(s) not found on PATH.
NB: root's PATH should usually contain /usr/local/sbin,
/usr/sbin and /sbin.
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)

A Catch-22, eh?  I give up.  How do I fix this?

-- 
Katie Bechtold         http://katie-and-rob.org/