Unmet dependencies

While updating Ubuntu 14.04, I came across the following error message:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 collada-dom-dev : Depends: collada-dom2.4-sp-dev but it is not installed
 collada-dom2.4-sp : Depends: collada-dom2.4-sp-dev but it is not installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try using -f.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit:

After it fails to install the missing package, using:

sudo apt-get -f install

I get this message:

Unpacking collada-dom2.4-sp-dev (2.4.4.1-ubuntu1~trusty1) ... 
dpkg: error processing archive /var/cache/apt/archives/collada-dom2.4-sp-dev_2.4.4.1-ubuntu1~trusty1_i386.deb (--unpack):
 trying to overwrite '/usr/lib/cmake/collada_dom-2.4/collada_dom-config.cmake', which is also in package collada-dom2.4-dp-dev 2.4.4.0-ubuntu1~trusty1 
dpkg-deb: error: subprocess paste was killed by signal (Broken pipe) 
Errors were encountered while processing:
 /var/cache/apt/archives/collada-dom2.4-sp-dev_2.4.4.1-ubuntu1~trusty1_i386.deb 
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Solution 1:

Moving aside the sources.list.d seems to be a fix that may not be desirable, and may actually not fix the root problem. Especially if there are sources in there that you actually want to keep. I think this is the better answer: dpkg error: "trying to overwrite file, which is also in..."

For this particular problem I used:

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/collada-dom2.4-sp-dev_2.4.4.1-ubuntu1~trusty1_amd64.deb

Note: you'll want to replace the .deb file with the one your system is complaining about. Still don't know what is actually causing this problem with updates today...?

Solution 2:

This seems to be related to ROS, the Robot Operating System, the main user of Collada. It may be a problem with having both ROS-Indigo and Ros-Jade (different versions) installed. After doing the suggested

sudo dpkg -i --force-overwrite /var/cache/apt/archives/collada-dom2.4-sp-dev_2.4.4.1-ubuntu1~trusty1_amd64.deb

to unjam the package system, I did a "sudo apt-get autoremove", which removed lots of old ROS-Indigo stuff. After that, "sudo apt-get check" showed no errors.

Solution 3:

I solved the problem. Apparently, I had third party repositories which were causing the problem. I removed them with the following:

sudo mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ /etc/apt/sources.list.d.bk/
sudo mkdir /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

I then ran sudo apt-get install -f