Sigh. Yesterday, most of GNOME hit Sarge, and today it reached the mirrors. It seems the result couldn't be more catastrophic... we really didn't expect GNOME packages to go into Sarge today, we probably only expected GTK+2.0 and a few of the lower GNOME libraries to make it. Instead, most of the modules managed to get in, including -panel, -session, -terminal and nautilus, but not including control-center and -applets, due to gst-plugins0.8 not being ready for testing yet.

This reportedly is breaking GNOME in Sarge quite severily, as nautilus is apparently missing a needed dependency on capplets, and nobody noticed. The result is nautilus showing the default icon (a blank paper) for all folder and file icons, making your filebrowsing experience quite interesting.

We're discussing what the most quick remedy may be. One alternative is to do uploads of -applets and control-center without gstreamer support and try to get those in fast. Another one is to see if testing-proposed-updates works and feed it with the gstreamer-less packages so they hit testing immediately.

For those who have already upgraded and need a solution, you will probably be ok if you just install by hand the missing packages, capplets 2.6.1-5, and the two dependencies missing in Sarge, libgstreamer0.8-0 0.8.3-1 and libgstreamer-plugins0.8-0 0.8.1-4. You will probably need to remove acme by hand too (and gnome-desktop-environment, if you had it installed).

If you don't know how to do this, the basics are these: to remove acme, do apt-get --purge remove acme. To install the three packages, once you have downloaded them, apt-get install libxklavier8 and then dpkg -i file1.deb file2.deb file3.deb. If you are a bit more experienced with Debian packages, the easiest is to add unstable (and leave sarge in too) to your sources.list, and after updating, do apt-get install gnome-control-center/unstable. After that, remove unstable from your sources again.

Bedtime now... In 5 hours I pretend to break my record mark of 10 days without any kind of triathlon training. The joy of injuries and lack of motivation.