On Byzantiun apt wants to uninstall pureos metapackages and initramfs-tools just to install libguestfs-tools.
But this did not happen on amber - i use guestmount pretty often on amber and its fine.
What would happen if I say yes to uninstalling these four packages:
initramfs-tools pureos-gnome pureos-minimal pureos-standard
More details:
On a pureos amber system I installed guestmount so i can dork with virtual drive images .
( i.e. if i forget the root password and need to edit /etc/shadow before booting a VM )
That works great on amber - other than friggin installing exim and mysql which is bizzarre.
Why do i need a mysql DB and a mail server just to mount a darn drive ?? 
But on a byzantium system its even worse.
( The problem is that I need to run grub-install to fix a ‘broken’ qcow2 image.
i am getting “symbol ‘grub_calloc’ not found” when i try to boot a TL OSINT VM that I converted to qcow2
I was assuming I could use guestmount to install grub or something. )
But apt - just to install libguestfs-tools - wants to install 72 other packages and it wants to remove these:
The following packages will be REMOVED:
initramfs-tools pureos-gnome pureos-minimal pureos-standard
So - the pureos packages are sorta metapackages I guess.
Seriously? Uninstall pureos-standard on a pureos system? And initramfs-tools ? I am afraid to install any of those.
I get that some of them are metapackages.
But can anyone tell me what would happen if I uninstall those four packages?
Maybe I can just build guestmount from source or use qemu-nbd.
But what the heck is the conflict - what if apt wants to do this for something else?
I looked at the list of 72 packages very briefly:
The following additional packages will be installed:
arch-test attr btrfs-progs db-util db5.3-util debootstrap dmraid dracut dracut-core exim4-base exim4-config exim4-daemon-light extlinux
f2fs-tools gawk gsasl-common guile-2.2-libs hfsplus icoutils kpartx ldmtool libafflib0v5 libbfio1 libconfig9 libdate-manip-perl
libdmraid1.0.0.rc16 libewf2 libgc1 libgnutls-dane0 libgsasl7 libguestfs-hfsplus libguestfs-perl libguestfs-reiserfs libguestfs-xfs
libguestfs0 libhfsp0 libhivex0 libintl-perl libintl-xs-perl libldm-1.0-0 libmailutils7 libmariadb3 libnetpbm10 libntlm0 libsigsegv2
libstring-shellquote-perl libsys-virt-perl libtsk19 libunbound8 libvhdi1 libvmdk1 libwin-hivex-perl libxml-xpath-perl libyara4 lsscsi
lzop mailutils mailutils-common mariadb-common mdadm mysql-common netpbm pigz reiserfsprogs scrub sleuthkit supermin syslinux
syslinux-common virt-p2v xfsprogs zerofree
Does syslinux cause all this havoc?
Anyway - any guesses as to what happens if I say ‘y’ ?
Update
FWIW - in case anyone else gets that weird grub_calloc bug:
I was able to fix the TL OSINT qemu image by using qemu-nbd and vgdisplay and then:
mount /dev/tlosint-vg/ /mnt/qemu-nbd0p5
mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/qemu-nbd0p5/boot/
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/qemu-nbd0p5 /dev/nbd0
-nonat