Installed library using checkinstall which created a package named "python" and causes dependency issues

Question

I wanted to try out the new major version of a c++ library called gtsam. Since I'm currently using an older version of the library for several projects and I wasn't sure about dependency issues, I decided to install it using checkinstall:

mkdir build && cd build
make
sudo checkinstall

Since it came with a python wrapper which I also wanted to install, I did:

cd python
sudo checkinstall python setup.py install

Now I wanted to remove the version again, so I checked under which package name the library was installed.

The main library was called "build" which I already found strange, although I could remove it using:

sudo dkpg -r build

When I now tried to do the same with:

sudo dpkg -r python

it complained about dependency problems because it's interpreting "python" as the main ubuntu python package.

If I do dpkg -l python I get:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                                          Version                     Architecture                Description
 +++-=============================================-===========================-===========================-==================================================
ri  python                                        20160629-1                  amd64                       Python part of gtsam-4.0.0-alpha1.

At this point I'm actually a little bit scared and don't know what to do, to fix this issue. I want to uninstall the files installed by checkinstall python setup.py install without screwing up the configuration of my system python setup.

I actually used checkinstall because I did not want to worry about reverting the installation...

Answer 1

Ok, so I think I solved the problem.

I found out that with apt-cache showpkg python I can view all the different python versions available. I picked the latest one and installed it using:

sudo apt-get install python=2.7.5-5ubuntu3

It gave me a warning it couldn't delete some "old directories":

dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages': Directory not empty
dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/local/lib/python2.7': Directory not empty
dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/local/lib': Directory not empty
dpkg: warning: unable to delete old directory '/usr/local': Directory not empty

But that's fine, since I actually tried to solve the problem without deleting these directories.

Now if I do a dpkg -l python I get the following, correct output:

Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name                                          Version                     Architecture                Description
+++-=============================================-===========================-===========================-====================================================================
ii  python                                        2.7.5-5ubuntu3              amd64                       interactive high-level object-oriented language (default version)

I will monitor if I get any more strange behaviour from my system, but for now it seems this fixed the issue.