Upgrading to 14.04 gives problems II

[Colin Law]

On 22 September 2014 16:54, sktsee <sktseer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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

Thanks for that Sktsee I have filed it away for future reference.
Sadly we don't know whether it would have helped in this instance, but
this sort of thing happens fairly regularly so hopefully it will be
helpful next time.

Colin