Upgrading to 14.04 gives problems II

[sktsee]

On Mon, 22 Sep 2014 12:30:56 +0100, Colin Law wrote:

[snip]
 
> 
> As I said it is likely the package came from a ppa or a manual install
> not from the ubuntu repository.  The sytem upgrade could not downgrade
> the package as it did not know the reason it was there. You are right
> though about apt-get, it could certainly have provided more helpful
> error messages.
> 
> If it did come from a ppa then the moral is to always use ppa-purge to
> get rid of ppas before upgrading.  It would be helpful if the upgrade
> process could suggest this (or even do it for you after asking). There
> is a page on the wiki that I follow when upgrading [1] (it leads you
> through uninstalling any non-standard packages before the upgrade),
> though even it does not specifically using ppa-purge.  Again possibly it
> would be good if the upgrade process pointed one at that before
> proceeding.  By following that I do not believe I have ever had a
> problem upgrading.
> 
> I still don't understand messages I posted in my last message, hopefully
> someone will elucidate.
> 

I don't know what led to the problem since I'm just catching up with the 
list's posts, but in the future you may want to use a debug option with 
apt-get to get more info about what the package manager is doing.

Example:
$ sudo apt-get -o "Debug::pkgProblemResolver=1" install <packagename>

You can also have as many options as you want with multiple "-o" in the 
command line.

$ sudo apt-get -o "Debug::pkgProblemResolver=1" -o 
"Debug::pkgPackageManager=1" -s purge <packagename>

Man apt.conf(5) for full list of debug options

-- 
sktsee