All around the internet as people have been trying to upgrade their Debian-unstable systems, they've been getting this error:

E: This installation run will require temporarily removing the essential package e2fsprogs due to a Conflicts/Pre-Depends loop. This is often bad, but if you really want to do it, activate the APT::Force-LoopBreak option. E: Internal Error, Could not early remove e2fsprogs

This sounded scary. But there was no option, I had to try this:

apt-get -o APT::Force-LoopBreak=yes install e2fsprogs

Lots of errors were printed out, mostly about how removing e2fsprogs entailed removing lots of essential libraries. I also got a warning whether I wanted to upgrade libc6. I selected 'yes'. Another list of services needed to be restarted. Apache failed to restart. I don't know why. But restarting it manually later succeeded.

For some reason the packages 'locales' and 'language-env' were removed, so I re-installed them. This process automatically removed package 'base-config'. Apparently that package can be removed with no ill effects.

Finally, I tried rebooting. It worked!. So, despite being a bit scary, it all came good in the end.

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