Recently (though I didn't notice until upgrading today) I had an update to LibreOffice Writer fail and stick me between LL series versions and cause today's upgrade to fail though I didn't realize anything had failed to update previously and the update notifier said my system was reported as up to date before I attempted the upgrade. So I ran apt policy to see where I was and yes LibreOffice writer was stuck between versions because LibreOffice core had already updated to 18.04.9 while Writer was at 18.04.7 thus sticking LL between version candidates 4.0.0030 and 4.0.0040 because LO Writer wouldn't install to 4.0.0040. Apt had held the update to LibreOffiice Writer without my noticing and LL update notifier had just reported my system as up to date. I like to use the LL GUI applications to repair things just to make sure they work for most people in most circumstances though I know the commands they run. This was a dpkg problem those generic commands could not fix and when they didn't work a ran them all from the CLI including removing apt lists and updating them over again. I didn't really expect them to work since LibreOffice is not a simple package, but I also had no intention of reinstalling LibreOffice either because there is a very good chance I could end up with the same error if it was some small non-internal to LO python or interpreter error. Okay. Time to read through some lines in /var/lib/dpkg/status about 49,000 or so, but that is easier than it sounds, if the first thing you look for is file corruption with bad characters. Within a few minutes I narrowed it down to three small python packages linked to IDNA (international domain name association) files: python-idna, python3-idna, and python-lockfile. I then just reinstalled the three small packages, updated the system, finished the hung LO Writer upgrade to 4.4, then upgraded to 4.6. I have yet to guess what messed up those little idna packages, and why update notification said my system was up to date though I expect that is because apt held back the upgrade to Writer singly as reported by apt policy and allowed the rest of the updates. Comments welcome.
TC
