Re: debian sid & gnome

[Dietrich Bollmann <diresu@web.de>]

Hello,

Thanks for all the answers :)

I am trying to answer to all of them at once...

Here my initial posting:

> Since weeks I can't update debian sid as apt-get always wants to
> remove gnome:
> 
>   apt-get dist-upgrade
>   [...]
>   The following packages will be REMOVED:
>   epiphany-extensions fast-user-switch-applet gnome
>   gnome-desktop-environment gnome-system-tools k3b libavcodeccvs51
>   libavdevicecvs52 libavformatcvs52 libavutilcvs49 liboobs-1-3
>   libpostproccvs51 libswscalecvs0 libuim5 scim-uim
>   [...]
> 
> As I couldn't find any mails from other users about this problem, I
> finally wonder if there is something wrong with my system.
> 
> Should I continue to wait for some more weeks until finally gnome can
> be updated again or is there some better way to proceed?

The temporary solution seems to be, as Daniel, Magnus and HS proposed,
to use aptitude rather than apt-get or synaptic.

The following sequence updated most of my system:

  aptitude update
  aptitude safe-upgrade
  aptitude -s full-upgrade
  aptitude full-upgrade

Concerning the latter command, I followed the advice of HS:

  Aptitude usually tells you what is broken and what is the suggested
  resolution. If you do not accept the suggestion, it gives you
  another different one and so on until you accept one or just quit
  the upgrade.

and only accepted a partial solution.

Aptitude still doesn't know about any final solution and still wants to:

  Remove the following packages:
  fast-user-switch-applet
  gnome
  gnome-desktop-environment
  gnome-system-tools

which I am rejecting.

This update / upgrade procedure removed the kde meta package which, as
Tom pointed out, didn't "hurt too much as it won't remove anything
except the meta package itself".  Also I am currently mostly using
gnome anyway.

Even if my system is in a somehow inconsistent state now, I can live
with this situation until the problem is solved and a new version of
gnome and kde can be installed.  The most important thing is that I
still can update the rest of my system. In Joe's words:

  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.

and also:

  so that's a matter of waiting

Concerning aptitude vs. apt-get / synaptic, Daniel said:

  The algorithms used to solve dependencies are different, so
  sometimes they'll produce different results.  aptitude has more
  facilities for showing why it's doing what it's doing, which is why
  I suggested it.

As the problem seems to concern all people using gnome on debian sid
(Daniel: [...] broken gnome-system-tools [...] broken kdenetwork
[...]), but still I couldn't find other postings about the problem, I
suppose that most of the people using debian sid rather use aptitude
than apt-get or synaptic to update their system and do not mind
packages listed as broken too much :)

To cite Daniel again:

  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 am happy to wait :)

Thank you all for your help,

Dietrich


PS:

Thanks to Ron for teaching me about:   apt-show-versions -u | sort