Bug#401317: Aptitude quite happily "upgrades" aptitude from sarge->etch

["Jonathan Quick" <jon@hartrao.ac.za>]

Hi Frans

In testing out upgrade of a fresh sarge installation which included the
desktop task ie. both Gnome and KDE, in desperation I found that (after
updating sources.list to point to etch and 'apt-get update') the
command

      aptitude upgrade aptitude

gives

Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
The following packages have been kept back:
 ...
The following packages will be upgraded:
  base-files console-common console-data debconf debconf-i18n defoma
  desktop-base dictionaries-common discover1-data doc-debian doc-linux-text
  docbook-dsssl docbook-xml dosfstools edict esound-common fortunes-min
  gcc-3.4-base gnome-desktop-data gnome-icon-theme gnome-mime-data gnu-efi gs
  gs-common gsfonts gtk2-engines-spherecrystal hicolor-icon-theme hotplug
  iamerican ibritish imlib-base initrd-tools kanjidic kdeartwork-misc
  kdeartwork-theme-icon kdeedu-data kdegames-card-data
  kdemultimedia-kappfinder-data kdewallpapers knewsticker-scripts
libeel2-data
  libevent1 libfinance-quote-perl libgda2-common libgnomeprintui2.2-common
  libgtk1.2-common libgtk2.0-common libgtksourceview-common
  libhtml-tableextract-perl libhtml-tagset-perl libhtml-tree-perl libmad0
  libmailtools-perl libmime-perl libnews-nntpclient-perl libpam-runtime
  libpango1.0-common libsnmp-base libss2 libtext-wrapi18n-perl
  libtimedate-perl liburi-perl libwnck-common libwww-perl
linux-kernel-headers
  lsb-base mailx makedev manpages manpages-dev menu-xdg mime-support
  myspell-en-gb myspell-en-us ncurses-term net-tools pppconfig sharutils
  sysv-rc ttf-bitstream-vera ttf-opensymbol wamerican xml-core
83 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 662 not upgraded.
Need to get 58.5MB of archives. After unpacking 11.9MB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]

and quite happily installs the 'etch' version of aptitude.  I suspect this
trick will work no matter what other Debian packages one has installed.

After that I found I had to run

  aptitude install libfam0

and

  aptitude install libglu1-mesa

to break two conflict loops and thereafter

  aptitude -f --with-recommends dist-upgrade

proceeds quite happily.  It says thet 0 packages will not be upgraded -
but I won't know how well it works till it completes.

Regards
  Jon