On Sun, 27 Sep 2015, David Wright wrote:
[...]
> So waiting could still be a sensible option at this time. Some of us
> have yet to finish sorting out jessie (in my case, as a production
> system, not as an upgrade target).
As far as I can tell waiting is unlikely to solve the upgrade issues.
That's what I did for a while, manually holding back packages until
there was no conflict anymore (since aptitude was totally overwhelmed),
but things did not get better. Finally I got enough insight into the
conflicts to solve them. The issues I found fall in just a few
categories:
* A lot of packages have been renamed from 'foo' to 'foov5'. If your
'foo' package was not marked as automatically installed ('i ' rather
than 'i A' in aptitude), then aptitude and apt-get will think it's
because you explicitly want the 'foo' package rather than the 'foov5'
one. So it will get stuck because the new packages want 'foov5' but it
cannot remove 'foo', resulting in a conflict. This is the issue that
waiting will never solve.
-> The fix: In aptitude use 'b' to go from one broken package to the
next, open the package page and go to the 'Conflicts' list.
If this shows the package conflicting with a 'foov5' package,
go back to the top of the page and press 'A' to mark the package as
automatically installed. It should be scheduled for deletion and
the 'foov5' should no longer be marked as broken.
(You can also go to the 'foov5' package to mark that you really
want it: '+')
* I had the same issue with the 'mysql-*-5.5' versus 'mysql-*-5.6' set
of packages and possibly with a couple others I forgot.
-> Fix: Again, mark the 5.5 packages as automatically installed and
aptitude will figure it out.
* I have both the 32 and 64 bit versions of libxml2-dev installed so I
can do proper Wine development work. The problem is libxml2-dev
depends on libicu-dev which depends on g++. But neither g++ nor g++-5
are not a multiarch package, not even 'MultiArch: foreign' ones. So
although libicu-dev is marked as multiarch, only one version can be
installed at any given time, unlike in previous versions (see bug
799100). This then caused a cascade of breakage.
-> Fix: The only way for now is to give up on multiarch for
libxml2-dev and revert to manually creating libFoo.so links in the
relevant /usr/lib directory :-( <rant>And to think multiarch,
"including cross-compiling environments for embedded systems" was
a release goal of the two year old Debian 7 and is marked as
"Completed in Wheezy". What a bad joke!</rant> [1]
* I had BuildBot installed but it had trouble with python-sqlalchemy: it
depends on 'python-sqlalchemy (< 0.10)' which is only available in
Debian Stable. It also depends on python-migrate which, if installing
the version available in Debian Testing, depends on python-sqlalchemy
>=1.0~). Instant conflict (see bug 794300). Combined this confused
aptitude and me enough that I removed buildbot for the upgrade.
-> Fix: Pick the python-sqlalchemy and python-migrate packages from
Debian Stable.
* Once I completed the upgrade I got a broken sddm (and if the results
when I replaced it with lightdm are anything to go by, a broken KDE
/ Plasma too). This is because of a missing version requirement of
some package on libqt5sql5 (see bug 802811).
-> Fix: Install libqt5sql5 and the packages it depends on from Debian
Unstable. There's already a fix for that which should get to Debian
Testing one day.
With all that I now have an _almost_ usable desktop.
- sddm does not start on boot, nor from the console. But I can log in
remotely and start it manually from there (see bug 803324).
- Switching the desktop effects off often kills kwin such that it does
not restart. But I really only need it to work once and I can start it
manually.
- plasmashell crashes multiple times per day, just as before the
upgrade (see bug 794110 and bug 801501). Fortunately it restarts
automatically so it just means I have to dismiss the crash dialog
regularly.
- KWallet keeps asking me to set it up whenever I *quit* Google
Chrome or *stop* openvpn as root (note: quit or stop, not start in
both cases! see bug 797877) even though I have no intention of using
it.
- And I have lost sound. Alsa does see the Intel HDA soundcard but
PulseAudio/Phonon don't and stick to the dummy sound output. Somehow
my user account got removed from the audio group but adding it back
and a logout+login did not solve the issue. I still have not figured
that one out yet.
But at least I should now be able to apply updates normally.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/
https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/MultiArch
--
Francois Gouget <fgou...@free.fr> http://fgouget.free.fr/
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke
