I have been bitten by this one. Severely : one of my systems won't get to the Gnome login screen and stays on a black screen (with an (active) mouse pointer).
* apt-get -t stable gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0 gnome-desktop3-data \ libgnome-desktop-3-17 won't do a thing. ditto with --allow-downgrades. * apt-get remove gir1.2-gnomedesktop-3.0 gnome-desktop3-data \ libgnome-desktop-3-17 wants to remove a lot of gnome and gnome-related packages. * I *suppose* that "the right use" of dpkg would allow this kind of surgery in the dependency system, allowing to replace a package by its predecessor while temporarily ignoring the dependencies. But I do not understand it well enough to divine the "right" set of operations. Since this happened during a routine update of testing, I suppose I am not alone to have to endure the consequences of an inadvertently missing dependency, and that this plan would be useful to a lot of people. Thanks in advance ! -- Emmanuel Charpentier