I've come across a puzzling problem after upgrading Linux Mint from version 21.3 to 22. This is a HUGE upgrade, that probably updates every single package on the system. The upgrade went well and took a long time, of course. Afterwards I found maybe 15-20 packages that were 'orphaned', meaning that no other installed package depend on them. The can normally be removed without any problem, if they are libraries for example. So I did that as I normally do. But I'm stuck with 3 of these orphaned packages, that can't be removed without causing problems. One such package is:
gir1.2-freedesktop
If I try to uninstall this package, I get the following error:
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: mintsources : Depends: mint-common (>= 2) but it is not going to be installed Depends: gir1.2-gtk-3.0 but it is not going to be installed Depends: gir1.2-pango-1.0 but it is not going to be installed Depends: gir1.2-vte-2.91 but it is not going to be installed Depends: gir1.2-xapp-1.0 but it is not going to be installed E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages. After investigating I find, that the 'orphaned' package gir1.2-freedesktop contains a number of 'virtual' packages. And other packages in the system depend on them, for example mintsources. I should mention that the commands
apt-get check(Checks the system for unmet dependencies)apt install -f(Attempts to fix unmet dependencies by installing missing packages)
Do not generate any suggestions, everything seems dandy. So the package systems 'seems' to be ok. Using the more thorough aptitude tool doesn't help. If I do a
aptitude purge gir1.2-freedesktop it simply shows me the dependencies of all the before mentioned virtual packages and suggest, that I should NOT remove gir1.2-freedesktop. Which I haven't of course.
So, how can this gir1.2-freedesktop package be marked as 'orphaned', when other packages clearly depend on its content?
This suggest, that the package database is somehow not in a well-defined state. I've tried reinstalling gir1.2-freedesktop and mintsources with
apt install --reinstall mintsources but to no avail.
Has anyone got an idea about, how to clean this mess up?
My system is working fine, but this situation puzzles me...
