I tried using aptitude in interactive more to do a routine update and
upgrade. It complains that there are broken packages and when I ask
to examine the situation it starts trying to resolve stuff and counts
opwn, closed, etc. conflicts. It continues to go on doing this
seemingly forever.

So I abort this and try to investigate.

Suddenly I start aptitiude in interactive mode and discover there are
a *huge* number of packages it's planning to install which are
currently not installed. I have no idea where all this has come
from. I certainly never wanted them. I didn't count, but there are
hundreds, possiby thousands of them.

Many of these packages are broken and uninstalled.

And it also tells me there are about 150 broken packages. Asking it
yo delete uninstalled broken packages one by one seems to have little
effect on this counter. Are these the installed broken packages? or
does it somehow include the uninstalled ones too?

Among the packages it thinks I want to install is systemd-dbg! It of
course is broken because there's no systemd.

And there are also a lot of gnome packages. I certainly never wanted
it to install gnome. I use fvwm.

Is there any way to restore this system to a sane state? Or even
figure out what went wrong?

-- hendrik