GNOME is destroying the whole GTK universe

When GNOME 3.14 components were uploaded into Debian (just a few days before the Jessie freeze started), GNOME stopped working on two video platforms: Geode (xf86-video-geode) and NVIDIA (xf86-video-nouveau). On Geode, GDM launches into a black screen. On NVIDIA, GDM launches as expected, but then the GNOME session itself barfs with the dreaded "Oh No! Something went wrong. [Logout]" dialog during session initialization. Basically, components in GNOME have become too tightly dependent upon some video driver features. Thinking out loud, I figured that reverting to a desktop environment that is based upon GTK+3, without GNOME's bells and whistles, would at least restore operation on my NVDIA hosts. Alas, it does not: Cinnamon, too, barfs during session initialization. Great. Now what?

On the Joey debacle

Looking back, I cannot think of a single moment when Joey wouldn't have shown the utmost patience and courtesy towards anyone involved in Debian, even towards mere users filing sometimes senseless bug reports against his packages. From this perspective, I cannot help but venture that whatever chain of events lead to Joey's decisions essentially means one thing: Debian must have seriously gotten off-course for someone who has been involved for so long to call it quits. As for the current situation at hands, while I admittedly haven't followed too closely who or what caused Joey's decision, I nonetheless cannot help but feel that whoever pushed Joey's buttons so hard as to make him decide to leave Debian ought to be the one(s) kicked out of Debian instead.

HEL has just frozen over. Wait. No. Debian did.

Noticing that Debian just entered its freeze, I went ahead and changed the APT sources on a spare host that is currently running stable. Then, it was time for this command to be executed:

sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get install apt dpkg locales && \
sudo apt-get --purge dist-upgrade && \
sudo apt-get --fix-policy install && \
sudo apt-get --purge autoremove $(deborphan --guess-all)

I guess I'll be busy filing bug reports for the next few hours. Wish me (and each faulty package's maintainer) luck!

PS: Apparently, so many aspects of Debian have become dependent upon GPG features that merely upgrading APT, DPKG and libc6+locales is no longer enough. One must also upgrade gnupg and gnupg2. Thus, the second element of the above recipe has become:

sudo apt-get install apt dpkg gnupg gnupg2 locales && \

Hopefully, APT's dist-upgrade command already knows that these must be upgraded first...

PPS: Hosts running Network-Manager cannot be upgraded remotely, because Network-Manager insists upon killing the network connection and the SSH daemon with it, when its turn comes to get upgraded.