[Solved] mintupgrade check: "pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks" – How to diagnose & fix?

[frucade]

Update: As described in this post, the problem was an upgrade bug introduced by the Ubuntu MESA team. The Mint team reacted very quickly and temporarily inhibited upgrades which would cause broken system. Meanwhile the problem has resolved.


I'm trying to upgrade a fully updated, non-broken package installation

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apt update ; apt dist-upgrade ; apt-get install -f ; apt autoremove --purge ; apt clean ; dpkg --audit

with no held-back packages.

I run into the following situation and I'm unable to understand where the problem is. libegl1 is even not installed.

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  + Simulating an upgrade...

-------------------------------------------------
    APT will now calculate the package changes necessary to upgrade to Linux Mint 19 'Tara'.
    If conflicts are detected and APT is unable to perform the upgrade, take note of the packages causing the issue, remove them, and re-install them after the upgrade.
    Pay close attention to what appears on the screen, and review the list of packages being REMOVED during the upgrade.
    Take note of the packages being removed, so you can eventually reinstall them after the upgrade.

    Do you want to continue? [y/n]: y
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... 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:
 libegl1 : Depends: libegl-mesa0 but it is not going to be installed or
                    libegl-vendor
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

Any hints?

[heinhuiz]

Same issue here.

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apt-cache search libegl1

shows that libegl1 is referred to by libegl1-mesa, but

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sudo apt-get --reinstall install libegl1-mesa

nor

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sudo dpkg-reconfigure libegl1-mesa

solves the issue.

Could it be a bug in the Mesa library?

[Silvock]

Hi, I've got some issues too

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   Do you want to continue? [y/n]: y
Lecture des listes de paquets... Fait
Construction de l'arbre des dépendances       
Lecture des informations d'état... Fait
Calcul de la mise à jour... Erreur !
Certains paquets ne peuvent être installés. Ceci peut signifier
que vous avez demandé l'impossible, ou bien, si vous utilisez
la distribution unstable, que certains paquets n'ont pas encore
été créés ou ne sont pas sortis d'Incoming.
L'information suivante devrait vous aider à résoudre la situation : 

Les paquets suivants contiennent des dépendances non satisfaites :
 icu-devtools : Casse: libicu-dev (< 60.2-3ubuntu3) mais 55.1-7ubuntu0.4 devra être installé
 onboard-common : Casse: onboard (< 1.3.0-1~) mais 1.2.0-1mint6 devra être installé
E: Erreur, pkgProblem::Resolve a généré des ruptures, ce qui a pu être causé par les paquets devant être gardés en l'état.

  + Restoring your backed up APT sources...

I don't understand what I should do ... remove these packages ?

[Moem]

Hi, I've got some issues too

Since they are different issues, please start a new thread.

[clem]

Hi there,

Make sure these packages are not foreign, i.e. that they don't come from PPAs.

The quickest way to do this is to remove/disable all PPAs, and then to ask Software Sources to downgrade foreign packages.

If there aren't please paste the output of their policy, with "apt policy packagename".

[heinhuiz]

Hi there,

Make sure these packages are not foreign, i.e. that they don't come from PPAs.

The quickest way to do this is to remove/disable all PPAs, and then to ask Software Sources to downgrade foreign packages.

If there aren't please paste the output of their policy, with "apt policy packagename".

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libegl1:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: (none)
  Version table:

[clem]

Hi everyone,

We're just after finding out Ubuntu backported mesa into Xenial with a version number higher than the one in Bionic. They basically broke the upgrade path between 16.04 and 18.04 and that affects us as well. Please hold while we try to find a workaround for this problem.

[clem]

Ubuntu recently backported MESA 18.0.5-0ubuntu0~16.04.1 into Xenial (on top of which Mint 18.x is based). The problem with this is that its version is superior to the one in Ubuntu Bionic (on top of which Mint 19 is based).

This creates issues in the APT dependency resolver during the upgrade, resulting in the removal of webkitgtk libraries, zenity, window managers (such as metacity and marco) and even DE components (cinnamon, mate, gnome).

Post upgrade it also creates issues because the upgraded OS runs on a 18.04 base, but still has a 16.04 version of MESA. LibGL isn’t linked properly, software or even DE fail to load.

Basically, the upgrade paths for Linux Mint 18.3 -> 19 and Ubuntu 16.04 -> 18.04 are currently broken by this update.

We contacted the Ubuntu MESA maintainer and we’re hoping he’ll be able to fix the situation quickly.

In the meantime, we updated mintupgrade to detect your version of MESA and to forbid the upgrade with MESA 18.0.5.

To prevent people from upgrading to it, in 18.3 MESA is temporarily a level 5 update.

We’re really sorry about this. We were getting a lot of successful feedback and all of a sudden it seemed upgrades failed for pretty much everybody. At least now we know why.

If you’re able to restore a snapshot prior to the MESA upgrade, you’ll be able to upgrade to Mint 19 properly. We’ve postponed everything else for now (I know this won’t please people waiting on LMDE) and we’re fully focused on this upgrade path.

Stay tuned.

Note: If you already performed the upgrade to Mint 19, a good way to know if your upgrade was affected by this is to run xreader. If it’s missing, or it’s unable to launch because of a missing libGL.so.1 library, we recommend you use Timeshift to go back to 18.3. People who upgraded before the MESA update in xenial/mint18 are not affected by this. Everybody else is likely to be.

[Jeffex]

Thank you Clem, this happened to me just now whilst running mintugrade check:

!! ERROR: MESA 18.0.5 currently breaks the upgrade between Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 and Linux Mint 18.3 and Linux Mint 19. Restore a snapshot taken before MESA was upgraded to 18.0.5, or wait for Ubuntu to fix this problem.

[heinhuiz]

Hi everyone,

We're just after finding out Ubuntu backported mesa into Xenial with a version number higher than the one in Bionic. They basically broke the upgrade path between 16.04 and 18.04 and that affects us as well. Please hold while we try to find a workaround for this problem.

Is this why https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseNotes states:

Upgrades from 16.04 LTS will not be enabled until a few days after 18.04.1's release expected in late July.

That statement has been there for quite some time, since end of April actually.

Does this also mean LM 19 has to be rebuilt up on 18.04.1?

[gm10]

Does this also mean LM 19 has to be rebuilt up on 18.04.1?

No, LM 19 is fine, and will get the 18.04.1 changes via the regular update channels.

In the meantime, why not just downgrade mesa again on xenial?

[heinhuiz]

In the meantime, why not just downgrade mesa again on xenial?

Because I'm a half-noob and I can't find out how to do that

[gm10]

In the meantime, why not just downgrade mesa again on xenial?

Because I'm a half-noob and I can't find out how to do that

That comment was more directed at clem tbh as something to be included in the mintupgrade script. But maybe they tried and ran into complications, I don't know.

You can downgrade a package like this:
apt install <package>=<version>

You would have to check your /var/log/apt/history.log to see which packages were upgraded and from what version and then roll them all back. It's quite a few of them. I'm not getting more specific because I think if you're not feeling confident it's better to wait for an official solution (my expectation is that the Mint team will simply wait it out until the Mesa update is also available in the main bionic repository).

[heinhuiz]

You can downgrade a package like this:
apt install <package>=<version>

Ah, alright, I was afraid that would be the answer. I just hoped there would be an easier way by downloading and installing an older version from https://mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/ and update that through the Update Manager. But I can wait. Thanks!

[willendorfer]

What exactly would be the Mesa version number I should go back to, if I want to downgrade with the apt install command?

[Luis Manson]

Well you can run

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sudo apt-get install libegl1-mesa=11.2.0-1ubuntu2 libgl1-mesa-dri=11.2.0-1ubuntu2

and see what happens, but in the end it resumes to a warning that you are doing something bad:

You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
?]

I see it as when HAL9000 says "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"

[PeterBell]

I fell foul of this problem, when I ran the upgrade on Friday. I wasn't quite sure what was going on and managed to get Mint 19 (Cinnamon) up and running with some aptitude magic. However, I note that xreader is not now available on my system.

Restoring a Timeshift snapshot is not an option - firstly, Timeshift was hanging at the "Calculating system size" stage. I waited more than two hours, but it never proceeded, so I took the chance on upgrading without a snapshot. Even if I could restore a snapshot, it would have been after the errant MESA upgrade.

Of course, I now have a problem with getting my system restored to full health again - all advice would be gratefully received.

[gm10]

Of course, I now have a problem with getting my system restored to full health again - all advice would be gratefully received.

If it's an option, back up your settings and do a clean install. It'll probably be faster and more reliable than investing time into manually fixing things that you currently don't even know are broken.

[PeterBell]

If it's an option, back up your settings and do a clean install. It'll probably be faster and more reliable than investing time into manually fixing things that you currently don't even know are broken.

Thanks for the response - not really the answer I wanted to hear, but that's not your fault!

Oh, and I worked out why Timeshift was taking so long - it seems that it was scanning all the nfs shares on my fileserver and complained that it needed 14TB to store the snapshot!

[gm10]

Oh, and I worked out why Timeshift was taking so long - it seems that it was scanning all the nfs shares on my fileserver and complained that it needed 14TB to store the snapshot!

yep, it's a bit crazy that timeshift doesn't exclude mounts automatically but all it's got is a hardcoded list for those the system sets up. so you need to set up filters manually for that.