apt commands fail because No file name for keyboard-configuration:amd64

Question

I just did an upgrade on my Debian install.

After updating my sources.list from Jessie to Stretch I did an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade.

While some packages failed to update the machine is still in a usable state. However 33 have failed to install properly starting with xserver-xorg-core.

It fails with the following message:

Setting up keyboard-configuration (1.164) ...

/var/lib/dpkg/info/keyboard-configuration.config: 5:

/etc/default/keyboard: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

dpkg: error processing package keyboard-configuration (--configure):

subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit

status 2 dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of

xserver-xorg-core: xserver-xorg-core depends on keyboard-configuration; however: Package keyboard-configuration is not configured yet.

Doing a apt-get install --reinstall keyboard-configuration returns the following message:

E: Internal Error, No file name for keyboard-configuration:amd64

Here is the output of uname -a:

Linux debian 4.9.0-6-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.82-1+deb9u3 (2018-03-02) x86_64 GNU/Linux

EDIT:

Here is the content of /etc/default/keyboard:

XKBLAYOUT=us,ca XKBVARIANT=, BACKSPACE=guess XKBOPTIONS=caps:escape"

Answer 1

The error message

/var/lib/dpkg/info/keyboard-configuration.config: 5:
/etc/default/keyboard: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

suggests there’s a problem with your /etc/default/keyboard file. Looking at the contents shows that you have an extraneous quote at the end of XKBOPTIONS; remove that and everything should work again (after a dpkg-reconfigure --pending).