dselect/apt-get: corrupted dependencies?

[Berthold Cogel <cogel@rrz.uni-koeln.de>]

Hello!


Last weekend I tried to update my system (stable/testing/unstable).
After I resolved all dependency problems with dselect I called 'apt-get
dselect-upgrade' to install all the packages. I got a lot of messages
about unmet dependencies. All of them covered programs I have already
installed in my system. Some say:

package x: Conflicts: package y but is not installable

or

package x: Conflicts: package y version a but version b is to be
installed

Example:

Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
  libgsm1: Conflicts: libgsm-dev but it is not installable
  libncurses4: Conflicts: ncurses but it is not installable
  transfig:  xv-doc: Conflicts: xvdoc but it is not installable
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be
caused
by held packages.
E: Internal Error, problem resolver broke stuff
Some errors occurred while unpacking. I'm going to configure the
packages that were installed. This may result in duplicate errors
or errors caused by missing dependencies. This is OK, only the errors
above this message are important. Please fix them and run [I]nstall
again
Press enter to continue.

Sometimes I get only one error, sometimes a lot of different errors.
At the moment there are no packages set to hold. There are no dependency
problems.
And: I have another computer with Debian Linux with almost the same
packages installed without any problems of this kind.
I have the feeling that somehow somthing is broken. Is there a way to
rebuild the package status from scratch?

Thanks in advance

Berthold Cogel