Stretch dist-upgrade problems
 

I have migrated to the new Debian testing (Stretch) a few weeks ago everything seems to have been working fine. I recently did an apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. I am now left with a broken system.

It seems some packages wants different versions of the same library for example:
"aptitude" wants libxapian22v5 while another such as synaptic wants libxapian22.

What the issue with the v5 versions & is there a way to resolve this?

Regards,
Stefan

There is a transition to gcc5 in progress - breakage is expected.

FWIW I'd listen to aptitude over synaptic.

I have the same problem, still can't upgrade.
so, what's the solution, to wait?
aptitude never ends dependency resolving.

Thanks for the information!

When will it be a good idea to upgrade to Stretch - a few months or will it be a shorter period? I have used apt pinning to force a downgrade to Jessie & I now at least have a functional system again.

Stefan

I have a similar problem. There are a couple of things you could try:
1. Use the --full-resolver option with aptitude safe-upgrade
2. Switch to apt-get upgrade.
I have been using the 2nd option until things get back to normal. For some reason in this particular case apt-get seems more patient than aptitude.
jdk

^ This.

Just use `apt-get upgrade` or `aptitude upgrade` until the transition is over and you can use `apt-get dist-upgrade` or `aptitude full-upgrade` again.

It took a while to settle down in sid but it should be a bit quicker in Testing.

Are you sure you are ready to use Testing?

I have been using it for several years. Since computing is not my day job, I am not up to date on the latest (somewhat radical it seems) changes. I always considered Debian Testing a more stable alternative than Ubuntu on the PC I use for my day-to-day stuff.

I have not been overwhelmed by the stability of Debian Jessie. KDE kept freezing on me and becomes unresponsive to keyboard & mouse events. So much so that I just swapped to xfce. I was hoping it may improve upgrading to Stretch. As it is, I was quite keen on getting XFCE 4.12 which did not make it into Jessie.

That's just silly.

Testing is not supposed to be reliable, it is intended for use by people who want to improve the quality of the next Debian release by *testing* the new packages.

I remember when k3b stable version couldn't write multisession CD/DVD while testing had that functionality; me too clung to testing for long time, to have latest libreoffice,wine,vbox and browser(for security); but after this I'm moving to stable for good, later to Ubuntu if that fails too.

If you want to use newer versions of software is the latest x.04 release of Ubuntu / Mint then the more stable choice compared Debian testing? Or is this entirely wrong & Debian testing should only be used by a small elite group of gurus and the plebs stick with Ubuntu?

It's got nothng to do with guru's or plebs - you just need to be aware of the purpose and consequences of "testing".
It's not there to provde shiny new shit for the kids who are too cool to run "old" versions - it's there to build and test the next stable.
While large transitions are happening, like now, it is clearly not possible to have a coherent system when half the stuff hasn't been finished yet.
Usually avoiding the components that are transitioning, like a particular DE or such, will still give you a mostly functional system - moving to gcc5 touches a lot more stuff so is going to take longer and be more messy.
The goal is to provide a coherent system in time for the next freeze (12-18 months) NOT a working system for YOU tomorrow.

Are they more stable? One of the reasons Ubuntu has bugs is it is a slightly modified Debian Testing.
If by an elite group of gurus you mean people who know what they are doing, the answer would be yes. As others have already pointed out, the purpose of the testing system is for a few users to help identify bugs and report them so developers can fix them. That requires people who know how to trouble-shoot occasional bugs.

Which brings up the obvious.
Why do you need the newest software?Putting aside for the moment the fact that the newer software is the more likely it is to have bugs, in most cases one should ask oneself if a new icon them and/or new colour scheme makes a newer version essential to have. If someone has hardware that does not work on Stable but does on Testing, that person has a legitimate reason to prefer Testing over Stable. On the other hand, if the desire for newer software is simply because one likes shiny new shit, distributions like Debian, CentOS and Slackware are not good choices. They focus on reliability, and therefore, have slightly older software. People enamoured with the latest and greatest should use distributions like Fedora and Arch.

Guys you will have to excuse my trolling a little bit. Descendant_command's original reply explained everything I needed to know & was appreciated. I just wanted to subtly point out that the next post was somewhat condescending & did not contribute much.

Just for background:
1) The machine I have Stretch on is one of 5 in my office. Not counting raspberry pi's & a banana pi. This has been my hobby since my 1st BBC PC. I use this as a always on desktop & to serve a few Tb of media files but it is not mission critical. I also use it for playing around with all the new shiny "shit" before I add it on my main PC & notebook. The computer was up & running with a forced downgrade by the time I posted the question initially. It is not a big deal.
2) I actually have the root backed up & bootable on a different partition anyway. If that also fails all my settings such as /etc & program selections are backed up on a DVD.
3) I used to have Debian Sid on this PC's predecessor with a custom compiled kernel when Etch was still in testing. Between kids & work my available time evaporated & I could not keep with all the latest developments so the next PC build moved to Testing.
4) My main PC is Jessie. For the time being the file servers with my important stuff are still on Wheezy. The kids have reasonably current versions of Ubuntu & Mint on their computers for ease of setup.

When I initially moved to Linux & decided to use Debian I actually started with Debian Sarge & unintentionally dist-upgraded myself to Sid. I left it there since it seemed like the best way to to get the hang of things & no one was around to tell me I could / should not use it. Funny thing is my "unstable" Debian never crashed compared to my Windows PC & I then ditched Windows for everything except games. But to show how far out of touch I have become, I used to be under the impression that major changes like gcc 5 & a new libstdc++ would get sorted out in Sid first.

I have found I seem to have to wait a shorter period for things to be sorted out in Sid than in Testing and that packages go missing for shorter periods of time -- making Sid sort-of more "stable" for me than Testing. I can't say I've ever experiences a "bug" in either -- with that said I bet I'll see one soon ;).