The chromium package in Debian testing broke a few days ago. After I ran “apt-get update” and “apt-get upgrade”, chromium disappeared from my Xfce menu, and the executable was gone from my system. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. Odd!
When I tried to re-install it by running “apt-get install chromium”, I got the following error:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
chromium : Depends: libudev0 (>= 146) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
Indeed, there is no package called libudev0 (there is, however, a libudev1, which I already had installed). Mysterious.
Being fairly new to Debian testing, I was at a loss as to what to do. After some googling, I discovered some information that’s useful to users trying to troubleshoot broken packages.
I already knew that Debian has a searchable package database on their website. If you search for ‘chromium’ in the testing distribution, you’ll get to a page for it.
What I’d never noticed before were the links on the right-hand side. Every package apparently has its own mailing list archive and QA page.
The QA page isn’t the easily thing in the world to make sense of. I couldn’t find a simple listing of bugs in reverse chronological order, which would let me quickly see the newest bugs filed. The closest thing is the list of all open bugs. There is also a dashboard page which is vaguely reverse chronological, though it may be sorted by priority; it’s not clear.
In any event, this was good enough. I could see the bug for the error message I was getting. Turns out an update had mistakenly built the package for stable, which is why the unmet dependency was coming up.
It’s yet to be fixed, but at least now I know exactly what the problem is.