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I was looking for a Whatsapp application for Ubuntu and came across whatsapp-purple. I added the repository and and when I then ran sudo apt-get update it showed errors:

Error is shown in this picture

After following the steps here: How can PPAs be removed? I got this output:

The error is given in this picture

Therefore, I ran

cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
rm -rf whatsapp-purple-ubuntu-ppa-xenial.list
rm -rf whatsapp-purple-ubuntu-ppa-xenial.list.save

After ls /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ both of them were gone.

Now here are my questions.

  • Why were the errors shown and what do they mean?
  • Are the repositories gone?
  • Was that the right way to do it?
  • Do we really need ppa-purge?
Community
  • 1
Emad Arshad Alam
  • 176

2 Answers2

2

The error 404 means that the repository wasn't reachable - either the link is dead or your connection is bad.

ppa-purge checks what packages you have installed from a repository so that it can gracefully replace them with equivalent packages from main repositories if that is possible, leaving you, hopefully, with an optimally functioning system after removing the PPA.

Without downloading information from the PPA about the packages it provides, this is impossible to do, so ppa-purge exits with an error.

A release file is what APT uses to securely check the packages you download - it will not install anything without checking the release file as this is used to verify package integrity - APT treats a missing release file as a serious security issue.

You did not need to use ppa-purge because you didn't install anything from the PPA. Removing the PPA's files in sources-list.d was sufficient and you have now removed the repository from your sources.

Zanna
  • 72,312
0

The Whatsapp-purple PPA has no packages for Ubuntu 16.04 so it gives an error when APT tries to fetch something from there.

Install ppa-purge and remove it:

sudo apt install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:whatsapp-purple/ppa