Aptitude reports break

aquaboot · 09-28-2011, 05:33 PM

Hello,

The other day I went to do an upgrade via aptitude and apt-listbugs reported grave errors with the update candidate for network-manager. Because of this I put a hold [aptitude hold network-manager] and then proceeded with the aptitude upgrade minus network-manager. All has been well until today, Synaptic gave me a warning message:

"An error occured, please run Package Manager... the error message was 'Error: marking the upgrade (E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.)This usually means that your installed packages have unmet dependencies'"

I also get a second Synaptic error window that says:

"A fatal error has been detected. Exception:
E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be
caused by held packages."

I have "unheld" network-manager since apt-listbugs now no longer reports bugs for that package, performed an aptitude upgrade but I still get the error messages. The issue makes sense to me- I held network-manager back and now there are unmet dependencies. But... how do I repair the situation?

Thanks in advance,

ab

widget · 09-28-2011, 06:10 PM

Have you run;

Code:

dpkg --configure -a

always a good place to start on something like this.

aquaboot · 09-28-2011, 06:27 PM

Thanks for the response. I ran dpkg --configure -a and then aptitude upgrade again and I get the same error messages. Will this dpkg command work for packages installed through aptitude?

Thanks Much,

ab

widget · 09-28-2011, 07:18 PM

dpkg is basically the heart of your package management system. Aptitude and apt-get depend on it. You can actually do any thing you can do in either of them with dpkg. They are easier. When they get into trouble is when you start messing with dpkg.

You might want to take a look at the man page for dpkg and see the other options. Also the command "dpkg -help" will pull up a lot of options.

aquaboot · 09-28-2011, 07:38 PM

Thanks. I can look at this as an opportunity to learn something new. :-)

Cheers,

ab

62chevy · 09-29-2011, 11:33 AM

I see you ran ' aptitude hold network-manager ' but did you ' aptitude unhold network-manager '?

Quote:

remove, purge, hold, unhold, keep, reinstall
These commands are the same as “install”, but apply the named action to all packages given on the command line for which it is not overridden.
The difference between hold and keep is that hold will cause a package to be ignored by future safe-upgrade or full-upgrade commands, while
keep merely cancels any scheduled actions on the package. unhold will allow a package to be upgraded by future safe-upgrade or full-upgrade
commands, without otherwise altering its state.

For instance, “aptitude remove '~ndeity'” will remove all packages whose name contains “deity”.

man aptitude

aquaboot · 09-29-2011, 12:49 PM

Thanks for the reply to my post. I'm 99% sure that I did an aptitude unhold network-manager and then aptitude upgrade, which didn't help. I'm not in front of my Debian box to confirm this but will do so later today and post the results.

-ab