Hi,
On Sat, Nov 01, 2025 at 11:44:42AM +0100, Daniel Kamil Kozar wrote:
Thanks Julian. Running with Debug::APT::Solver=3 does seem to highlight the
actual problem. The issue appears to be caused by Thunar recommending the
policykit-1-gnome or polkit-1-auth-agent virtual packages which apt to try
installing Cinnamon as the default ("try it") first choice :
[…]
I ran into the same problem. In my case, it was nm-connection-editor depending on policykit-1-gnome|polkit-1-auth-agent, with policykit-1-gnome being dropped from Debian testing a couple months ago. Trying to apt install polkit-1-auth-agent and picking a suitable alternative fixed the issue for me.
A couple notes/ideas about what would have made this easier to resolve:
Debug::APT::Solver=3 is completely undocumented (I tried man apt.conf, and later confirmed by grepping the entire apt sources).
apt could have hinted that policykit-1-gnome will become autoremovable after the upgrade that installs cinnamon, then I might have had an idea what to look for.
Perhaps a more user-friendly debug option might be added that
only shows info about dependency chains for newly installed packages
during full-upgrade? If I could do apt full-upgrade -VV or
something and get an output like "nm-connection-editor →
policykit-1-gnome|polkit-1-auth-agent → cinnamon" then I'd immediately
know what's going on and what needs to be done to resolve this.
Or perhaps if apt full-upgrade told me months ago
that policykit-1-gnome dropped from the archives and needs
replacing?
In case you want to test this yourself, I could reproduce the very same
situation in the forky Docker image. Just apt update/upgrade to get it to
apt 3.1.11, and then do "apt install thunar". You'll see a very similar list of
packages that I'm getting.
Also note that in today's debian:testing docker image, apt install nm-connection-editor makes different choices depending on solver. 3.0 tries to install cinnamon, legacy solver goes with xfce-polkit.
Tomáš "liskin" ("Pivník") Janoušek, https://lisk.in/