Daniel Burrows wrote:
So, these are the dependencies it's trying to resolve. The big problems for you are probably the broken gnome-system-tools (which is required by gnome-desktop-environment) and the broken kdenetwork (which is part of kde). In the case of kdenetwork, you can't upgrade it until kde is rebuilt for your architecture -- according to packages.debian.org, packages like dcoprss are only at 4:3.5.9-2 on amd64, hppa, and ia64 so far. gnome is broken because gnome-desktop-environment depends on gnome-system-tools, which depends on both system-tools-backends and liboobs-1-3; however, the new version of system-tools-backends conflicts with liboobs-1-3. So the version of gnome in sid just can't be installed at all, ever. In other words, neither of these packages can be upgraded right now.
I'm currently updating sid with Synaptic for the first time in about three days, so it's about a quarter of a gig. xorg has been troublesome for some days, but is OK this time, kdenetwork cannot be sorted, even by uninstalling things, so that's a matter of waiting. This is a recent one, it wasn't there three days ago.
system-tools-backends has been troublesome for, I think, a couple of weeks. Also, k3b-data wants to remove k3b, also a recent change.
Occasionally, installing what would go and then retrying the difficult packages has worked, as the system was unable to try every possible order of installation and at least one order did work. It's also worth trying an apt-get dist-upgrade now and then, but definitely not at the moment, as it agrees with Synaptic.
But the fact is that some of the time, the sid repositories are in an inconsistent state, and a bit of patience is required. Looking at the current rate of updates, about 70MB a day for my 2200 packages, this is not entirely surprising.