how can we fix a broken dist-upgrade?

Question

Yesterday i tried to do a dist-upgrade to 15.10, and it got broken.

The fact is that the hard disk had no much free disk space (around 650mb), and the upgrades are over 1500mb.

Upgrade manager didn't work, so I entered,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sed -i 's/vivid/wily/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

and seeing that it was accessing Wily, I upgraded packages by hand (first dependencies and libraries), and all remaining packages later.

The upgrade worked almost fine, except one thing: previously I had to uninstall some larger packages I had installed (like Gimp, Inkscape, Scribus, Blender, Krita, Openshot, etc.) and I can’t install them back:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 libgtk-3-0 : Depends: libmirclient9 (>= 0.17.0+15.10.20151008.2) but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Is there any way to fix this? Or the only way is to do a fresh install over it?

Solution

• Force the installation of libprotobuf-lite9v5

  sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-lite9v5
  

• Repair the system with

  sudo apt-get install -f
  

• Mark the package as being installed automatically

  sudo apt-mark auto libprotobuf-lite9v5
  

• Install the needed packages

  sudo apt-get install gimp
  sudo apt-get install inkscape
  

Comments

[A.B.]

Edit your question and add the output of apt-cache policy libgtk-3-0 libmirclient9 and the output of sudo apt-get install -y libmirclient9

[Paulo Silva]

thanks! in the meanwhile i actually fixed by trying "sudo apt-get install libmirclient9" (that shown "Depends: libmirprotobuf3" ), then "sudo apt-get install libmirprotobuf3" (that shown "Depends: libprotobuf-lite9v5"), and then "sudo apt-get install libprotobuf-lite9v5" - it removed all packages that were conflicting, and i finally could install inkscape and gimp - but anyway, thanks a lot @ByteCommander and A.B. , your feedback is really useful for when i got into similar issues eventually!! :)

[Paulo Silva]

anyway, what i have now is (i guess it shows it’s perfect now): pastebin.com/raw.php?i=qfmN4HHB