Ubuntu Xenial Update Dependency Breakages

[Andrew Morgan]

Hey all,

Trying to update my Ubuntu Xenial template, but hitting following
dependency issue. You can see my attempts to resolve this to no avail:

...
Reading state information... Done
3 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt list --upgradable
Listing... Done
qubes-gui-agent/unknown 3.2.17-1+deb8u1 amd64 [upgradable from:
3.2.13-1+xenialu1]
xserver-xorg-input-qubes/unknown 3.2.17-1+deb8u1 amd64 [upgradable from:
3.2.13-1+xenialu1]
xserver-xorg-video-dummyqbs/unknown 3.2.17-1+deb8u1 amd64 [upgradable
from: 3.2.13-1+xenialu1]
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt install qubes-gui-agent
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
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:
qubes-gui-agent : Depends: xserver-xorg-video-dummyqbs (=
3.2.17-1+deb8u1) but 3.2.13-1+xenialu1 is to be installed
Depends: xserver-xorg-input-qubes (= 3.2.17-1+deb8u1)
but 3.2.13-1+xenialu1 is to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt install -f
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-video-dummyqbs
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
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:
xserver-xorg-video-dummyqbs : Depends: xorg-video-abi-18 but it is not
installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt install xorg-video-abi
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package xorg-video-abi
user@xenial-desktop:~$ sudo apt install xorg-video-abi-18
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package xorg-video-abi-18 is not available, but is referred to by
another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'xorg-video-abi-18' has no installation candidate
user@xenial-desktop:~$

Any idea how one would get out of this situation? Is anyone else facing
this with their Xenial VM?

Also I sometimes get the error that /var/lib/apt/lists/lock is present
when starting my xenial machine and thus it cannot update/upgrade. Is
there any way to ensure this file isn't present after a reboot/stop the
system from occasionally not cleaning this file up?

Thanks.

[Unman]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2017 at 07:23:21PM -0700, Andrew Morgan wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Trying to update my Ubuntu Xenial template, but hitting following
> dependency issue. You can see my attempts to resolve this to no avail:
>
> ...

> Any idea how one would get out of this situation? Is anyone else facing
> this with their Xenial VM?
>
> Also I sometimes get the error that /var/lib/apt/lists/lock is present
> when starting my xenial machine and thus it cannot update/upgrade. Is
> there any way to ensure this file isn't present after a reboot/stop the
> system from occasionally not cleaning this file up?
>
> Thanks.
>

> --

Hi Andrew,

You have what is generally know as a FrankenDebian. Actually it's a
FrankenBuntu, of course.
I'm assuming that you have added Qubes repositories to apt sources, and
specified Debian, although you are running Xenial. Qubes doesn't provide
repositories for Ubuntu packages, (as yet).
You cant just install the Qubes Debian packages on your Ubuntu system.
What you *should* do is build the updated packages (as you did when
making the template), transfer them to the template and install them
locally.

If you don't want to do that you can try to force the install of the
Debian packages, by manipulating dependencies.
You can override the apt dependency checking for individual package, by
using an appended hyphen.(This is very useful and not many people know
about it.)
In your case you want something like:
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-video-dummyqbs xorg-video-abi-18-

Then you will need to try to force the install of
xserver-xorg-input-qubes (= 3.2.17-1+deb8u1)
and make sure that the old Xenial packages are properly purged.

None of this is impossible, but it isn't straightforward. Building your
own Xenial packages would be much better.

On the "lock" issue, I see this sometimes, mainly on Zesty, but then I
see it on vanilla Ubuntu too: if it bothers you you could delete the
file in /rw/config/rc.local.

cheers

unman

[Reg Tiangha]

On 06/21/2017 06:23 AM, Unman wrote:
> I'm assuming that you have added Qubes repositories to apt sources, and
> specified Debian, although you are running Xenial. Qubes doesn't provide
> repositories for Ubuntu packages, (as yet).

I've been thinking about this. I assume part of the reason for this is
that there's limited capacity on the Qubes development end to either
maintain or manage an Ubuntu update repository on Qubes infrastructure,
and while I think there was talk about having some sort of hosted
Community repository in the past, I'm sure that's been deferred so that
efforts can be focused on getting R4.0 out the door.

But there are so many third-party Ubuntu PPAs hosted on Launchpad. Would
it be possible for either the Qubes project or a group from the
community to build and host Qubes update packages on that platform,
independently from the Qubes project if need be, so that everyone in the
Qubes community who runs Ubuntu templates can benefit? Granted, I don't
know what the criteria is to get projects hosted over there, and Qubes
packages would only really benefit those running Ubuntu on Qubes and not
a normal Ubuntu user (so maybe that would disqualify it?), but it would
be nice if some kind of repository could be set up to host the
Qubes-specific packages that get updated whenever there are updates for
mainline Qubes for community-supported templates like Ubuntu and
Archlinux (and maybe others like CentOS and Trisquel in the future).

What I've been doing is keeping an eye on the qubesbot on Github and
whenever something gets pushed out, to take note of it and compile my
own versions, but it's a pain to push out to all my VMs. I think I'm
leaning towards setting up my own local repository to push updates to so
that I can use that in my VMs rather than manually installing those
packages myself, but it's something I don't have experience in (yet).