Ubuntu
dpkg package

Installing xz-utils: You are about to do something potentially harmful.

Bug #426086 reported by Michael B. Trausch
64
This bug affects 13 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
dpkg (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown
dpkg (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Medium
Unassigned
Nominated for Karmic by Jonathan Nieder
Nominated for Lucid by Robert Readman
lzma (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown
xz-utils (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown

Bug Description

Binary package hint: dpkg

Attempting to install xz-utils yields:

mbt@zest:~$ sudo apt-get install xzutils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package xzutils
mbt@zest:~$ sudo apt-get install xz-utils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  imagemagick-doc
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following extra packages will be installed:
  liblzma0
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  lzma
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  liblzma0 xz-utils
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  lzma (due to dpkg)
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1 not upgraded.
Need to get 245kB of archives.
After this operation, 426kB of additional disk space will be used.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
 ?]

Meaning that I'm not installing it right now.

Please fix for release, or remove it from Karmic's repositories, or remove the message that says "this is bad and will break all your stuff" so that people don't feel like the world is ending when installing it. Thank you.

I have assigned it to dpkg as it seems to be the cause of this message, per the line that says (due to dpkg).

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

dpkg pre-depends on lzma; if we want xz-utils to be installable as a replacement then we need to adjust the pre-dependency.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

(or make lzma and xz-utils coexist, which in some ways might be better ...)

Changed in dpkg (Ubuntu):
status: New → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Medium
Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in dpkg (Debian):
status: Unknown → New
Changed in lzma (Debian):
status: Unknown → New
Changed in xz-utils (Debian):
status: Unknown → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Rene Leonhardt (rele) wrote :

This bug still exists in Ubuntu 9.10.
Is there a solution to let lzma and xz-utils coexist (to be able to use them both from tar)?

Revision history for this message
Jan Claeys (janc) wrote :

Rene, for me xz-utils removed lzma without complaining that it is "essential" (as it conflicts against but also replaces lzma, and contains replacement lzma & unlzma binaries)?

xz-utils tried to overwrite a file from lzip though (which I reported as bug #467803).

Revision history for this message
bortis (bortis) wrote :

Hi folks,

The lzma-utils which the lzma tool in karmic is based on, is no longer under development. All the work is now going into xz-utils. xz-utils has also a binary called lzma which will do exactly the same. So I can't understand why ubuntu is not including xz-utils in main, since tar is requiring it for all the xz compressed packages that are all over the internet now.

http://tukaani.org/xz/

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in dpkg (Debian):
status: New → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Robert Readman (robert-readman) wrote :

lzma utilities is not under development any more, xz-utils does everything lzma does, so fixing the error saying it would break things (when it doesn't do no harm) would be good for the 10.04 release, however 10.04 should ship with xz-utils, as it ships with GNU TAR 1.22 and that requires xz-utils to make .tar.xz files with the -J option.

Revision history for this message
Jonathan Nieder (jrnieder) wrote :

This is a grave problem in xz-utils in karmic, but it should be already fixed in lucid. Please let me know if that is not the case.

Revision history for this message
Andy (andy-xillean) wrote :

is this not going to be fixed in Karmic? Are we going to be forced to upgrade the entire OS just to get this feature working? Thanks.

Revision history for this message
Ben Thornton (smenjas) wrote :

@Andy: Under Karmic, I just installed xz-utils and ignored the warning, and everything worked fine.

I would be surprised if they were to change this is Karmic, since it's not an LTS, and changing it would impose a huge testing burden to ensure that it worked with everything. But I'm not an Ubuntu developer, I just report bugs, so you may not want to take my word for it.

Revision history for this message
Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote :

dpkg will no longer depend on lzma in maverick, once this change has built:

dpkg (1.15.7.2ubuntu1) maverick; urgency=low

  * Resynchronise with Debian. Remaining changes:
[...]

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 20 May 2010 15:41:52 +0100

[...]

dpkg (1.15.6) experimental; urgency=low

[...]
  [ Guillem Jover ]
[...]
  * Add support for xz compressed data.tar member of binary packages. Add
    xz-utils to dpkg's Pre-Depends. Closes: #542160
    Thanks to Jonathan Nieder for the initial patch.
  * Use xz command to handle lzma compressed files in dpkg and dpkg-dev.
    This removes the lzma package from both dpkg and dpkg-dev dependencies.
[...]

 -- Guillem Jover <email address hidden> Fri, 12 Mar 2010 00:15:31 +0100

Changed in dpkg (Ubuntu):
status: Triaged → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
onny (onny) wrote :

Bug still present in Ubuntu 10.04. I'm not able to install xz-utils :(

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater)
Changed in lzma (Debian):
status: New → Fix Released
Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)
Changed in xz-utils (Ubuntu):
status: New → Fix Released
no longer affects: lzma (Ubuntu)
no longer affects: xz-utils (Ubuntu)
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