On 31/07/2021 22:03, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> I'm practicing upgrades on my spare laptop, getting ready for doing my server
> upgrade from ascii to beowulf..
>
> They are both running ascii.
>
> Starting, of course, by making the ascii up to date still as ascii, before I try tye
> upgrade to beowulf.
>
> Having trouble doing even this innocuous act.
>
> I tried starting by using interactive aptitude to just update and upgrade.

After changing your sources to point to the new release, have you run
"apt-get upgrade" or "apt-get dist-upgrade"?
It looks to me as if you did the former.

> Only to discover that *every* package that might be upgraded was "held", and could
> therefore not be upgraded even though newer packages were available.
>
> What could be causing this? Or rather, how should I go about trying to track down
> the origin of these holds/this mass hold?
Packages might be held back in several situations, for instance when
download fails or checksum mismatches. In your case I would guess it is
because dependencies of the held back packages have changed.
The "dist-upgrade" action handles that, not "upgrade".

To check your current state, you could always run "apt-get check" or
"aptitude why-not <package>".

To fix the current situation, you could run the "dist-upgrade" action,
which is the official, documented way of doing release upgrades (cf.
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/debian-faq/uptodate.en.html#apt).
That will also take care of the cleanup, ie will offer to remove packages.
Check what it tells you to do before accepting (and maybe run it with
the "--simulate" option?), especially having a look at the proposed
packages removal.

You could also try "apt-get --with-new-pkgs upgrade", which should
download the new dependencies (in case that is your problem), but I
suspect it will leave litter behind.
I suggest this only as a possibility, but would encourage you to follow
the best practice stated above.

Bernard (Beer) Rosset
https://rosset.net/