After an dist-upgrade from Raspian 8 (jessie) to 9.13 (stretch) hundreds of packages still need to be upgraded and aptitude reports numerous conflicts.
I first wanted to upgrade everything which doesn't causes any conflicts, which fails because of problems in wolfram-engine: root@uranus:~# aptitude safe-upgrade --no-new-installs -RZ Resolving dependencies... open: 2242; closed: 1906; defer: 121; conflict: 311 The following packages will be upgraded: acl <+36.9 kB> adduser <-222 kB> alacarte <-20.5 kB> alsa-utils <+198 kB> aspell-en <+95.2 kB> avahi-daemon <+53.2 kB> [...] xserver-common <+53.2 kB> xserver-xorg <+1024 B> xserver-xorg-input-all <+1024 B> xterm <+163 kB> The following partially installed packages will be configured: debconf-utils The following packages are RECOMMENDED but will NOT be installed: at-spi2-core bsd-mailx cinnamon dunst exfat-utils fonts-piboto gdisk gnome-accessibility-themes gnome-flashback gnome-screenshot [...] xfce4-notifyd xfonts-base xserver-xorg-input-wacom xserver-xorg-legacy 663 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 344 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/283 MB of archives. After unpacking 89.8 MB will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Reading changelogs... Done Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^(.*?)(\\)?\${ <-- HERE ([^{}]+)}(.*)$/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 72. Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^}]+)}/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 30. Extracting templates from packages: 100% Preconfiguring packages ... dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) Failed to perform requested operation on package. Trying to recover: root@uranus:~# I tried to remove packages wolfram-engine and wolframscript, also tried to remove debconf-utils, but everything fails with the same error message: root@uranus:~# dpkg --force-all -P wolfram-engine dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename Also, upgrading a single package that's completely unrelated, is not possible: root@uranus:~# aptitude install acl The following packages will be upgraded: acl libacl1 The following partially installed packages will be configured: debconf-utils{b} 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1005 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/80.7 kB of archives. After unpacking 49.2 kB will be used. The following packages have unmet dependencies: debconf-utils : Depends: debconf (= 1.5.61) but 1.5.56+deb8u1 is installed and it is kept back. The following actions will resolve these dependencies: Remove the following packages: 1) debconf-utils Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] The following packages will be REMOVED: debconf-utils{a} The following packages will be upgraded: acl libacl1 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 1005 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/80.7 kB of archives. After unpacking 58.4 kB will be freed. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] Reading changelogs... Done Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/^(.*?)(\\)?\${ <-- HERE ([^{}]+)}(.*)$/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Question.pm line 72. Unescaped left brace in regex is deprecated, passed through in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/\${ <-- HERE ([^}]+)}/ at /usr/share/perl5/Debconf/Config.pm line 30. dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting: files list file for package 'wolfram-engine' contains empty filename E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2) Failed to perform requested operation on package. Trying to recover: root@uranus:~# What else can I do to get the package management working again? urs