[RESOLVED] Broken packages when upgrading with Synaptic

[Supersayano]

Today I went to update packages in Synaptic and others have been updated without problems, but these four that this image shows do not allow me to do so.



When I try it shows me this:



So it says 'Changes could not be applied. Please fix broken packages first.'.

And now in the left panel the 'Broken Dependencies' section appears, and in that section this is displayed:



Or if I try to install only the 'linux-headers-generic' package it shows me this:



That is, it says that it depends on another package that is not going to be installed.

I haven't added any repositories lately if that's what you're thinking. I'm attaching here a screenshot of the window where you can see what repositories I have. As you can see, there are only repositories for some programs, but in those repositories there are no system packages like those 4 packages that are giving me problems.



Greetings...

[Supersayano]

Well, it seems that the problem has solved itself. Today I tried to update those same packages just like yesterday and this time there was no problem, that is, they were installed and that's it. So, well... if anyone knows what could have happened, it would be appreciated to clarify this strange thing, but if you ask me, I think it was not a local problem but with the repositories, and today it seems that they have solved it.
Greetings...

[jlittle]

... if anyone knows what could have happened...

I see your location is " España"...

If the server you are getting updates from is refreshing from the main server just as you update, or more likely something goes wrong with that refresh, your system can see an inconsistent set of updates. This used to happen to me more often some years ago, but hasn't for a while. Sometimes I, or another Ubuntu user, had to contact my country's server's admin to sort it out.

If you do get such a problem, you can try setting the "Download from:" in software properties (one way is sudo software-properties-qt) to the main server to eliminate that possible cause.

[Supersayano]

Thanks for your reply. But that can't be the problem since as you can see in the image I have the 'Main Server' selected in the configuration.



Regards...

[Snowhog]

A likely cause might have been a glitch in getting all the packages in that update populated to the server(s). In a case like that, IF a package(s) dependency(ies), which are also updated, aren't on the server at the time 'you' fetch the updates, something like what you experienced could occur.

[Supersayano]

Yes, that's what I thought. But shouldn't the repository servers upload all the dependencies of all the updated packages at once so that these things don't happen?.
Regards...

[claydoh]

Considering the huge number of packages that need to be synced to a vast network of mostly independent mirrors around the world, this is pretty much impossible.

The country specific source urls as well as the Main one really are just balancers that send you to one of many individual mirrors.

[Supersayano]

I understand that, but perhaps they should understand how badly they can mess things up, that is, the damage they can cause with these things, taking into account that it could very well be the case that they break the installations.
Regards...

[claydoh]

But the installation is not broken. Nothing has been updated because of the problem, by design so your OS itself had not been affected.

Debian's apt has been around for 26 years and is pretty robust.

[Supersayano]

The installation was not broken because I sensed that the problem was not mine but the repositories' and therefore I did nothing, but if it were not so, someone else might have tried something to solve the problem and what they would have achieved is breaking the installation. And all because of the almost unforgivable failure of the repositories.
Regards...