Apt-get dist-upgrade wants to pull about seventy packages, but some are
libraries which will be replaced by new versions. Gimp and
gnome-mplayer are in the list, which I'm not willing to give up yet. If
I get bored, I might mess around with synaptic to see if I can upgrade
a few, but clearly there is still significant trouble.
OK, I've got it down to 120 packages stuck, almost all KDE and
libreoffice, but with another small logjam around aptitude and
synaptic. I did hit a small jackpot, upgrading one minor package which
brought more than a dozen other packages with it, packages which
themselves wouldn't upgrade without a lot of grief. I have in the past
fixed logjams of twenty or thirty packages simply by doing the upgrades
in the correct order, a level of complexity beyond aptitude, but this
lot isn't going to go so easily. Things are improving, about a week ago
there were more than two hundred stuck, and as you say, all the
compiler-related stuff has cleared.