sgarrulo:
>
> I had an installation of debian stable (stretch) which was fully upgraded something
> like a couple of months ago. Then I passed it to testing (buster).
There should not be that many changes, but I generally would only
upgrade to a newer release when the current system is up-to-date with
regards to its current version.
> If I do a normal upgrade, 676 packages are to be upgraded, but only the gtk/qt unrelated ones
> (for example, apache2-doc but none of the apache2 *real* packages, or vim-addon-manager and vim-doc
> but none of the vim *real* packages, and so on)
I would start with that, if only to get these packages out of the way.
> And if I try to upgrade, let's say, vim-* packages, it wants to remove a ton of seemingly unrelated
> packages, like calibre, evolution, gir1.2-*, gstreamer things, kid3, libqt5-*, pidgin, vlc-*, etc etc...
>
> This happens when I try to upgrade or install apparently *anything* related to GUI programs (GTK/Qt related).
You can use aptitude's TUI to investigate these things. It should at
least help explain why this happens. It is very possible (or likely),
that testing is just in bad shape for this upgrade right now.
(And no, reporting this as a bug is of no help here because the Debian
release process is not designed to support what you are trying to do at
a random point in time.)
> I am worried to make an upgrade like that.
Rightly so.
> What can I do to debug this situation and try to understand which package(s) is/are breaking everything?
Aptitude. I do not like how it behaves and how you control it, but for
this kind of investigation it is without alternative. Instead of the TUI
you can also use 'aptitude why' and 'aptitude why-not'.
J.
--
People talking a foreign language are romantic and mysterious.
[Agree] [Disagree]
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