Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 09:19:35AM +0100, Justin B Rye wrote:
# Please note that neither of them are 100% accurate (e.g. the
# aptitude example will list packages that were once provided by
# Debian but no longer are, such as old kernel packages).
Now that you come to mention it I've always thought that was a bad
example, since after all it isn't exactly a false-positive - old
linux-images really are no-longer-Debian packages, and if you've got
some lying around even before the upgrade, this would be an
appropriate time to get rid of them, as we go on to say a little
later.
Old kernels are sometimes kept around as a kind of backstop in
case a new kernel turns out not to work properly.
Sure, that can be how you come to have old ones unpurged; but you
can't safely treat a kernel from what's now oldstable as "known good",
because when you reboot into it you might quite easily discover that
it's incompatible with the stable udev/libc/whatever.
Yes, but how do you come to be running a system with non-Debian
repositories in your sources and installing packages to inspect the
gory details without already realising you've done that?
You may have forgotten.
You may have long ago enabled a nonDebian repository to install some nonDebian package. Unbeknownst to you, that repository also contained variants of debian packages which ended up replacing the Debian packages
you expected to keep.
A real mess. They look like Debian packages, but they are not.
Th the extent that the new packages have more recent version numbers than
the intruding packages, things may still go well.
It's a pity "apt policy" is no easier to interpret than the old
apt-cache equivalent. But this does begin to make a bit more sense
when I consider the issue of pinning - you can't check your system is
sane *just* by a glance at /etc/apt/sources.list. Plus, tools like
this can make obvious sense on a testing/unstable development system,
so you might have got used to it there and then installed it on your
stable desktop as well.
Now that we've got "https://deb.debian.org/debian/", we're close to
being able to say that standard procedure is "for the duration of the
upgrade, comment out any lines that don't match that URL".
Sounds like a valid thing to do, anyway.
We might (next time round) say something to the effect that "the
recommended setup is to have a basic sources.list as similar to fig 1
as possible. Although many variations are possible and will work
reliably on a stable system, you should consider simplifying things
for the upgrade".
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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