plymouth version conflict?

[Stan Schymanski]

Hi Daniel,

Thanks a lot for your help, and I really appreciate that you tried to
explain how to fix similar problems in the future. I think it is fixed
now, but I wonder if I understand correctly. I installed libplymouth5
without problems but when trying to install plymouth (after running sudo
apt autoremove, as suggested) I still see the below message, which tells
me that plymouth-label will be installed along with it, but base-files,
bash, libnss-mdns and mawk will be removed:

$ sudo apt install plymouth
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required:
  libplymouth4
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it.
The following additional packages will be installed:
  plymouth-label
Suggested packages:
  plymouth-themes
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  base-files bash libnss-mdns mawk
The following packages will be upgraded:
  plymouth plymouth-label
WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed.
This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
  base-files bash
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 4 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 155 kB of archives.
After this operation, 7,098 kB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
 ?]

Looking through some of your previous suggestions, I tried

sudo dpkg --force-all -P plymouth plymouth-label
sudo apt install plymouth plymouth-label

But it still tried to unisnstall bash among other things, so I aborted.

Although there was no mention of gawk anywhere, I tried your suggested
Step 3:
sudo apt install gawk && apt purge mawk

After this, I could install plymouth, which installed mawk along the
way. Was gawk really needed, or could I just have purged mawk to fix the
problem?

I.e. is the strategy to do the steps that apt wanted to do all at once,
one-by-one, starting with the non-critical ones?

Thanks again for your help.

Cheers
Stan



On 11/29/20 2:56 PM, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> On 11/29/20 2:28 PM, Stan Schymanski wrote:
>> Does anyone know how to clean this up?
> 
> no offence, no hard feelings.. but.. you're asking the exact same
> question several times already (in different words, with different
> packages), which boils down to:
> 
>   "how do I find out which package holds another one back?"
> 
> ..so it's worth to explain it rather than to answer with 'do $this and
> $that, and you're good'.
> 
> 
> if package A in version 1 (installed) wants to be upgraded to version 2,
> and that version 2 conflicts with package B, then the upgrade of package
> A is hold back.
> 
> apt shows this directly on the console.
> 
> 
> the one you're struggeling with is when package B is a relation, e.g.
> 'package B or package C', or 'package B and package C << version' etc.
> 
> in these constellations, apt does *not* show anything about package B,
> but it's error message only talks about package A not being installable.
> 
> 
> in order to get from 'package A is not installable' to 'I need to do
> $whatever', you have to iteratively hunt it down, for your specific use
> case (more or less.. I don't remember the detailed dependency chain by
> heart):
> 
> 1. step: sudo apt install plymouth
> -> will fail because it depends on libplymouth5
> 
> 2. step: sudo apt install libplymouth5
> -> will fail because it either breaks 'mawk << $stable' or depends on
>    gawk (which should be installed by default anyway when using the meta
>    packages)
> 
> 3. step: sudo apt install gawk && apt purge mawk
> 
> 4. step: sudo apt install plymouth
> 
> 
> last but not least: "why does this happen?"
> 
> plymouth from buster->bullseye doesn't upgrade cleanly, the
> breaks/depends should be fixed.
> 
> this usually gets reported by people doing upgrades during the release
> cycle from stable->testing, and get eventually ironed out when the
> automatic upgrade tests happen in the last weeks of the freeze before a
> new stable release).
> 
> when doing our backports, we usually catch absolutely all of these
> (alas, if they are in the gnome-desktop dependency chain) and fix them
> in debian proper (I reported/send patches for >60 of such upgrade issues
> for bullseye since the release of buster).
> 
> this specific one with plymouth hasn't showed up here because on our
> systems, via the 'progress-linux-base-system' package we always install
> gawk in the first place and thus are not susceptible for it.
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
>