I just royally screwed up my Debian box

[GoofKing]

All I wanted to do was upgrade Gimp, and I just had to follow someone's advice on stack overflow about adding some testing repository to my apt-source list

Now I have a crap load of upgrades and some programs that needs removing and I fear that I'll run into a dependency hell, which my dad calls it when you try to install or upgrade packages but run into a loop because of unresolved dependencies :/

I hope Synaptic is good about dependencies ... Anyone knows how I could resolve this issue or could some packages be re-installed after the upgrade ?

 

[GoofKing]

I didn't really screw it up but my desktop is a lot different, except for some reason some root-privileged apps and programs don't run anymore :/ That's what I get for using someone's advice without giving it a second thought or looking more into it

maybe I'm more angry at myself ...

 

[Sev]

All I wanted to do was upgrade Gimp, and I just had to follow someone's advice on stack overflow about adding some testing repository to my apt-source list

Now I have a crap load of upgrades and some programs that needs removing and I fear that I'll run into a dependency hell, which my dad calls it when you try to install or upgrade packages but run into a loop because of unresolved dependencies :/

I hope Synaptic is good about dependencies ... Anyone knows how I could resolve this issue or could some packages be re-installed after the upgrade ?

Perhaps you could have just taken the "software updater" GUI pathway and not have had to deal with all this
I honestly have no clue how your going to get around those unresolved dependencies, since I've never been in that position. Is doing a clean re-install a possibility? Maybe you could manually edit the repository list again?

And for what its worth, don't feel bad about it, I've also plugged in someone elses code into terminal without fully understanding what it is actually doing - and have done some brutal damage because of it.

 

[StephF]

I prefer to avoid Synaptic and just use apt-get instead. Once you get into dependency hell it quickly snowballs, a lesson i only needed to learn once.

 

[dragonwolf]

Is there any particular reason you're running Debian proper, as opposed to something like Ubuntu or Mint? (More curiosity than anything, but if you're looking to have new versions of software, Debian seems like an odd choice.) Without knowing what PPA you added, or what software updated, it's hard to help you too much.

That said, my guess is that the PPA you added included upgrades to other things that also depend on a library on which Gimp depends, such as GTK+. Given the differences between newer and older versions of Gnome, this probably accounts for your desktop looking different.

That said, I added a Gimp PPA for a newer version, back when Ubuntu was stuck on an older version for the foreseeable future and never had issues with updating with it installed (I've done it with a number of PPAs, actually). I've never really had issues with dependency hell caused by a PPA, because apt-get/aptitude usually does a good job keeping it all straight.