Pretty much every major Debian upgrade I've done has gone somewhat wrong. Normally I have to grobble about among Perl dependencies or something. Recent examples have had dselect repeatedly trying to get dpkg to again install something that only just failed, and circles of dependencies (this time with tetex things among others) where several things needed to be upgraded at once rather than separately. I generally have to bring out the --force options at some point or another.

I avoid apt like the plague, instead using the dpkg-ftp access method. apt tries to be far too clever for my liking. I prefer to have more control over the process. So, it 'only' took a few hours today to bring one machine from woody to sarge, where at one point it decided to get rid of sysvinit. And, what I really want is etch, for the AMD64 stuff.