dependancies gone to hell - now what?
 

Hello everybody!

First of all, I'm using debian with packages that are mostly from unstable (will _anything_ work with debian on an earlier stage?)

I just did another apt-get upgrade, and the result is that half of my gtk2-related packages (including libgtk2.0-bin) won't install. They all say stuff like:
Many programs don't start up anymore, but they do it silently (I try to start them up in the shell, and they just sit there, not doing anything, no window appearing, but no errors either).

I'm completely lost here. I've tried to go back to testing with apt-pinning, almost everything worked fine, except the errors with libgtk2.0-bin and the related packages didn't go away.

Is there perhaps any way to tell apt-get to revert to the latest versions of all these packages? I mean, automatically, without researching the version history of every package and pinning every single one manually? Or does anybody know these errors and have a suggestion?

Thanks a lot in advance,
-Wojtek

Perhaps you could try 'apt-get dist-upgrade' or 'dselect-upgrade',
rather than plain old 'upgrade'?

Thanks, that got rid of a few errors :)

Now there's only a few packages left bitching around. They all say:
and some also say:
I tried reinstalling gconftool-2, didn't help. This seems to be a general problem concerning gconftool-2 though, because I can remove neither anything that depends gconftool-2 nor gconftool-2 itself, as I'm getting the same error while trying to do apt-get remove of to remove those things via dselect.

Any ideas? I'm really quite lost here...

If you are removing packages and then reinstalling them later in the hope that they will then work,
keep in mind that you don't just remove, your must '--purge' also (to get rid of old config files).

In deselect you do this with '_' instead of '-'.
With apt-get remove add '--purge' to options.

Thanks for the info, I've got the habit of generally purging instead of removing though, so this can't be the problem...
Have you maybe got an idea which package might cause the g_assert_warning error in gconftool-2 and the xml errors?

Well, I kinda got the thing resolved... mostly.

The solution was to pin unstable at highest priority (again), do apt-get dist-upgrade, ignore the errors, recompile the 2.4-versions of glib and gtk+ and (I think this is the important part) recompile the newset available version of gconf from source, and then do apt-get install again. This got rid of most errors, except in one library that nothing needed anyway, so I just removed this library. After 10 hours of banging my head on the keyboard, everything works again :)

Thanks for the support everybody!