May not mean anything, but I quit using aptitude back with Jessie, I
think. Maybe ASCII. The main reason was exactly what you describe. There
was a major difference between what apt/apt-get did and what aptitude
did. It may not be maintained anymore, or maybe maintained, but not as
strongly, but appears to have settings that are not consistent with
apt/apt-get.

Recommend you just use apt update/apt [dist]upgrade and all your
problems could (maybe, possibly) go way.

Rod

On 8/1/21 10:33 AM, Bernard Rosset via Dng wrote:
> 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/
> _______________________________________________
> Dng mailing list
> Dng@???
> https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng

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