Unable to install Dropbox on Ubuntu 20.04

[Xavier-G]

Hi,

With this morning updates on beta version of Ubuntu Focal (20.04), system uninstalled Dropbbox because it updated package libpango.

So I downloaded the new deb package on Dropbox site, and saw that it was a new version from 4th March 2020, good !

But installation failed :

sudo dpkg -i dropbox_2020.03.04_amd64.deb

dropbox depends from libpango1.0-0 (>= 1.36.3) ; but:
Package libpango1.0-0 is not installed

But it's well present :

libpango-1.0.0-1.44.7-2

Please could you update your installation package ? Thanks !

[flabdablet]

@Durin Yes, they absolutely should. But I didn't want to wait around for them, so I used equivs to build and install a temporary replacement for the missing transitional package:

apt install equivs
mkdir /tmp/pkg
cd /tmp/pkg
cat <<EOF >>libpango1.0-0
Package: libpango1.0-0
Version: 1.44.7-4
Depends: libpango-1.0-0
EOF
equivs-build libpango1.0-0
apt install ./libpango1.0-0_1.44.7-4_all.deb
apt-mark auto libpango1.0-0

after which Dropbox installed without complaint. With any luck, that apt-mark auto will mean that once Dropbox does get its act together and stops depending on packages deprecated seven years ago, apt will clean up all by itself and let me forget I even had to do this .

[N3m3si5]

Indeed the Dropbox team should update the dependencies for the deb packages. For completeness I did attatch two links to debian bug report tool as well as to Mojang (Minecraft) Bug report. One of the debian package maintainers explained the current situation very detailed

https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MCL-13662

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956520

Best Regards

[flabdablet]

Dropbox seems to work just fine with the quick and dirty transitional package I built with equivs, so it doesn't seem like it actually does depend on any of the libraries formerly bundled in the long-deprecated libpango1.0-0 package other than libpango-1.0-0 itself. That *should* make the change required inside Dropbox's own deb package completely trivial; just adding the - to the dependency should be all that needs to be done.