I just tried to upgrade my Debian Wheezy 7 to the latest stable Debian Stretch 9 by not thinking too much and just changing the word wheezy with stretch in /etc/apt/sources.list so onwards on it looked like so:
cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ftp.bg.debian.org/debian/ stretch main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.bg.debian.org/debian/ stretch main
deb http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ stretch/updates main
# stretch-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
##deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ stretch-updates main
I also make sure all the defined Google Chrome / Opera / Skype and Squeeze Backports repositories existent in /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory files which in my case were like so;
root@noah:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# ls
google-chrome.list opera-stable.list squeeze-backports.list
opera.list skype-stable.list
were commented out because they were producing extra apt update errors …
And afterwards ran as usual:
apt-get update
apt-get –yes upgrade
The upgrade command executed fine and a lot of packages got downloaded and reinstalled without much issue, so I thought everything would be fine and just proceeded with the attempt to finalize the distribution major release 7 to major release 9 by running:
apt-get –yes dist-upgrade
But guess what now I got some dependency errors with cron and other installed packages that depend on package versions that are not going to be installed as the apt-get tool informed me.
I tried to out-smart the dpkg dependency system and removed all the packages reporting to have a missing dependencies with a short for bash loop after duming all the problematic packages showing dependency issues with commands such as:
apt-get -f dist-upgrade >> out.txt
for i in $(cat out.txt); awk '{ print $1 }' >> to_delete.txt; done
Before proceeding further I had to manually edit few lines in a text editor to remove some of the junk left from apt-get too.
So i was brave and just removed the dependency missing packages with following other for loop:
for i in $(cat to_delete.txt); do dpkg -r –force-all $i; done
Now I was hoping that rerunning:
apt-get autoremove
dpkg --configure -a
apt-get update -f
apt-get dist-upgrade -f
would no longer complain and I would just install the removed packages in another for shell loop once every other packages gets installed.
But guess what I was wrong … the system entered into another bunch of depedency terribly issues and messed up so badly that there were at least 50 packages reporting to have a missing / broken or uninstallable deb version depedency …
I got totally Angry, I knew already from experience that just trying to jump over while skipping a major release e.g. upgrade Debian 7 to Debian 9, instead of first upgrading to Debian 8 Linux and then upgrading Debian 8 to Debian 9 have always produced the same mess but I was lame and stupid again to f**k it up and I was out of mind swearing (a truly bad habid I'm not proud of) …
So as the notebook with Linux so far was perfectly working with Debian 7 and had a tons of old installed software and I was in a state where if I restart the system it was very likely my Thinkpad r61 laptop won't boot at all, I googled around to find a solution unfortunately without any luck, so finally I used the good old and tested method to DO IT MYSELF and Find the Fix without Uncle Google's help and by God's grace I did, after experimenting a while with the aptitude package / install / remove update tool without much success, finally I find the solution to the totally messed up Debian package dependencies and it all came to a simply reverting back my /etc/apt/source.list to look like following:
# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 _Wheezy_ – Official amd64 CD Binary-1 20130504-14:44]/ wheezy main
##deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 7.0.0 _Wheezy_ – Official amd64 CD Binary-1 20130504-14:44]/ wheezy main
deb http://ftp.bg.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.bg.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main
deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main
# wheezy-updates, previously known as 'volatile'
##deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main
deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main
##deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free
#deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main
###deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free
##deb http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ wheezy main
#deb http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian-volatile wheezy/volatile main
###deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free
run of the following two depedency fix commands !!!!
aptitude upgrade –full-resolver
…
aptitude full-upgrade –full-resolver
…
After a while a Debian LinuxOS system downgrade was initated and the missing packages were found, downloaded from the correct wheezy repositories and all broken and missing dependencies packages were fixed !!! HOORAY IT WORKS AGAIN!!
