If you are a user of Debian-based Linux distro, especially the unstable release (so called Sid in Debian), broken packages are not special. They may arise in your day-to-day activities with the distro (that’s the reason of why the word unstable is used!). While the reason to use the unsable release is obvious: to live in the bleeding edge of software release (including the packages), one still feel surprise of the broken packages event. That is also happen to me, I use Devuan Linux for my daily activities. Devuan is Debian withoud systemd. I have my own reason to not using systemd - I might reveal that later. As a person who loves to stay in the bleeding edge of software release, I use ceres - a sid release of Devuan.
My problem started yesterday, when I recklessly did sudo apt full-upgrade after sudo apt update and said Yes. The result is broken XOrg X Window System since xserver-xorg package and all dependencies were removed. I tried to cure the situation by sudo apt install xserver-xorg but it will install keyboard-configuration and keyboard-configuration package needs xkb-data version <= 2.35.1 while I have 2.38-2 (version for ceres).
To handle this situation, one usually needs to wait for the new package information and hope that everything will be alright for the next update. Unfortunately, there will be no certain time when will the update be available, so, I need to downgrade the package from 2.32-2 to 2.35.1. I use sudo apt install xkb-data=2.35.1 but it didn’t work. So, what I did is just grab the package from Devuan pakace information and then installed it using dpkg:
$ sudo dpkg -i xkb-data_2.35.1-1_all.deb
After that, I installed xserver-xorg using sudo apt install xserver-xorg, and everything back to normal.
