After a week long trip, I came back home and tried to update my oldest desktop running PopOS 22.04. sudo apt-get upgrade got me an error that zlib1g:i386 was not configured, and then died. So I tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure zlib1g:i386 and got a message that the filename was invalid. Duh.
Then I tried this:
And…well, for the sake of brevity, let’s just say it failed.
So I pulled up an old, dusty memory about the --fix-broken flag, and sure enough it ‘unbroke’ apt-get and fixed everything up. Well, I did have some ‘held back’ packages but that was easy enough to fix.
But the point of this question is that there are some other front-end tools besides apt-get. aptitude, apt, and wajig come to mind. Would either of those tools been able to automatically correct the mess I just wasted a bunch of time on?
When you do linux upgrades you can often leave behind “cruft” - old config files, old default packages, old packages (and their dependencies). This can result in upgrade weirdness, especially when you have third party / backport packages installed.
Things get even weirder with multilib (steam/wine), as multilib dependency management can cause a lot of issues. Sometimes a package provides both i386 and x86_64 in one package, sometimes they’re separate packages. It sounds like you’re getting stuck in multilib issues here.
The only real way to avoid all this is to ensure older packages are removed, and that third-party packages have been updated for the new distro version.
Firstly, if you don’t know about APT phased updates, I suggest finding out about them. You may be, as I was, confused by them. They’re not a problem, other than that confusion.
In the past aptitude could sometimes fix broken packages that apt-get could not. I’ve used aptitude to do that twice since 2006.
And the follow up question is, of course, how does one accomplish this?
Confusion is indeed the correct term. The wording of the status message in apt-get’s output could surely be clearer.
IIRC, aptitude has some kind of interactive UI that is rather unintuitive. But the few times I’ve used it from the command line it seems to have operated similarly to apt-get.
Things are getting better though as linux develops more.
As a long time user though the only dissapointment i have with linux is the issue with repositories changing( and little if any news when they change or go defunct)
Debian and Mint repositories so far i havent had issues with, other distros however can be a pain.
Before i switched away from buntu’s it was getting to be a real pain trying to download apps.
And sadly ive seen some damn good OS’s go under for lack of support.