apt problem

[Antony Gelberg <antony@antgel.co.uk>]

Hi all,

I am now running the Woody XFree86 backport.  I then thought I'd be a
nutter and go for Gnome 2.2 as well.  But Gnome didn't want to install,
perhaps I should have removed something first, so I backed it out.

I think some crud is left somewhere - I need to install debhelper but
can't:

brain:~# apt-get install debhelper
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.

Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely that
the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
that package should be filed.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
  debhelper: Depends: debconf-utils but it is not going to be installed
  E: Sorry, broken packages
  brain:~# apt-get install debconf-utils
  Reading Package Lists... Done
  Building Dependency Tree... Done
  Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
  requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
  distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
  or been moved out of Incoming.

  Since you only requested a single operation it is extremely likely
  that
  the package is simply not installable and a bug report against
  that package should be filed.
  The following information may help to resolve the situation:

  Sorry, but the following packages have unmet dependencies:
    debconf-utils: Depends: debconf (>= 0.9.59) but it is not going to
    be installed
    E: Sorry, broken packages
    brain:~# 

brain:~# ls /var/cache/apt/archives/debconf*
/var/cache/apt/archives/debconf_1.2.23woody1_all.deb
brain:~# 

So debconf-utils needs debconf >= 0.9.59, but I appear to have 1.2.23.
Can someone please explain what is going on?

I suspect that the updated debconf might have been installed as part of
gnome 2.2 dependencies, but that's just a hunch, and anyway, it's a
later version than is required.

Antony