When I did look at sysvinit-utils from Aptitude GUI, the problem was obvious, there was a deadlock, and of course the installation would not be possible. However this is what happened:
# aptitude -t stretch install sysvinit-utils The following packages will be upgraded: initscripts sysvinit-utils 2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 370 not upgraded. Need to get 0 B/151 kB of archives. After unpacking 0 B will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y Retrieving bug reports... Done Parsing Found/Fixed information... Done Reading changelogs... Done (Reading database ... 190131 files and directories currently installed.) Preparing to unpack .../initscripts_2.88dsf-59.6_amd64.deb ... Unpacking initscripts (2.88dsf-59.6) over (2.88dsf-59.4) ... Preparing to unpack .../sysvinit-utils_2.88dsf-59.6_amd64.deb ... Unpacking sysvinit-utils (2.88dsf-59.6) over (2.88dsf-59.4) ... Processing triggers for systemd (230-1) ... Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) ... Setting up sysvinit-utils (2.88dsf-59.6) ... Setting up initscripts (2.88dsf-59.6) ... Current status: 370 (-2) upgradable. So, nothing special happened: the dreaded bug didn't show. I did the rest of the upgrade, and rebooted before sending this mail, to be sure... no problem arose. Chris