Problems with XFree 4.0.2 when upgrading from stable to testing

[Chris Stork <cstork@ics.uci.edu>]

Hi everyone,

I'm new to Debian, so forgive me if I miss the obvious.  (I tried to
read as much of the relevant docs as possible, but maybe I missed
something...)

When upgrading from potato to woody (added the testing lines to
sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get -f dist-upgrade) the new X 4.0
packages are held back (how does that work anyway? Any documentation
about the _rationale_ for that?).  I thought I just have to reboot (like
with SuSE), but then my machine hung on entry to runlevel 2.  It seems that
my rc scripts weren't upgraded yet.  Ok, so then I did dpkg --configure
--pending.  That configured some more packages but the new X packages were
still kept on hold -- so I installed them manually.  (Why do I have to do
that?  Shouldn't apt be able to figure that out?)

I guess I am missing something fundamental here.   I assumed that Debian
tries to convert my 3.3.6 config files to 4.0.2-7 ones or at least guide the
user thru the configuration using debconfig.  Is that true?  If not should I
just configure the system as if I got it directely from xfree.org?

Any comments/clarifications appreciated!

BTW my kernel is still 2.2.18pre21.  Next time I'll use script to document
my upgrade better.  :-)

Chris