plymouth version conflict?

[Daniel Baumann]

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

-- 
Berner Fachhochschule / Bern University of Applied Sciences
Services / IT-Services
Daniel Baumann
Teamleiter Linux & Infrastructure Services
___________________________________________________________
Dammweg 3, CH-3013 Bern
Telefon direkt +41 31 848 48 22
Telefon Servicedesk +41 31 848 48 48
daniel.baumann at bfh.ch
https://bfh.ch
https://bfh.science