Firstly many thanks the replies, although just being able to explain a problem can give one much better insites, its always nice to get others experience. Chris Samuel said,
I'm puzzled by what you say here, you seem to imply the sequence is:
1) Install 7.x from DVD 2) Upgrade to Debian testing 3) Downgrade from testing to 8.1
That is correct, the important point though is the delay, the last upgrade was well over 6 months ago and _____BEFORE______ doing any dist-upgrade I ALWAYS check what will happen using dselect as unlike aptitude it will display every change that will be done. IMPORTANT point here apt and dselect use different package lists both these need to be updated separately to keep the system in sync. Russell Coker said,
I've had ongoing problems with aptitude insisting on removing things I >want.
I have checked this out and apt appears not te be aware of some packages. as previously stated in one of my cases "blender", apt wanted to remove it due to two missing dependencies, both packages were installed and dselect was aware of them apt was not. From my experience the more dist-upgrades are done the more debians package system gets itself into a twist. I have previosuly solved this by building my own mirror using apt-move and doing a netinstall from that. This itself has its own problems due to apt as mentioned previously not being aware of some packages, this can be fixed to some extent using "apt-move sync". I nearly always have to fix some small issues using either dselect or even the ultimate debian package management tool dpkg. I will do this this time once I am sure all packages needed are in my local mirror. A remaining problem here is that apt and dpkg/dselect usually have a different idea on what one has on the system, dselect always showing more packages are installed. Note: I THINK this is because dselect will track old packages still installed apt appears not to be able to do that. Never a dull moment when mucking around with computors ;-),:-(. Lindsay