Dev1 Galaxy Forum / [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 19:27:55 +0000

Did you actually run that sed command?

I did and the file I tested did not show any change before and after the sed command.
BUT then I marked that one in my vi and pasted it with the middle mouse button into the vi on another machine (remote terminal), assuming it would be "the same", which apparently is a wrong assumption, since with that move you get the mentioned spaces in the blank lines. That is most likely the reason why the file on my machine has a different file size than the one I pasted here.
Lesson learnt and again appoligies to mess this up.

host deb.devuan.org

That perhaps works easier as my long way around. Hope I remember the next time I need that knowledge

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (chris2be8) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 17:15:00 +0000

Re post 23:
host deb.devuan.org will give you a list of addresses it maps to. Running traceroute against each address should let you find the nearest (although the smallest number of hops isn't always the fastest option/best).

Though you probably want to run host address to find what the apparently nearest mirror is.

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (ralph.ronnquist) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 11:26:29 +0000

Did you actually run that sed command?
I copied and pasted from your post #14 and got a file of 1603 bytes.
That is the size of the file in your post #22
I then ran that sed command and got a file of 1598 bytes.
The differences are in removal of space characters on the blank lines.

Perhaps you have different explanation why your file is 1603 bytes?

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 10:24:21 +0000

Not the case here. Both versions have the same size.
I insert blank lines with the "o" command of vi, followed by [ESC], so no characters in those lines.

Still think something might be amiss with my nameserver, see my post #23
(replacing the deb.devuan.org with single mirror, which gave me a good result with traceroute, works fine)

Darn! you were right. I am notoriously copy and pasting with left/middle mouse button.
Turns our, if you open the working file in one vi, mark it there and drop that into another open vi, it will add the mentioned (by ralph.ronnquist) spaces in blank lines.

Sorry for being an annoyance.

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (ralph.ronnquist) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 23:07:48 +0000

It appears your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devuan.sources have blank lines that are not empty, but each contains a single space character. Therefore that whole file becomes treated as a single block of key: value pairs, where the last one for each key overrides all other.

I don't know which which editor you use to accomplish that single-space-character blank lines, but if you run the following command it will be happier:

sed 's/^\s*$//' -i /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devuan.sources

You can verify that the file is slightly smaller after the command, and if you first copy the file to /tmp/OLD you can compare them with diff or meld to see what I talked about already some posts ago.

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 20:27:30 +0000

Did a bit of experimenting.
I just did a:

traceroute deb.devuan.org

several times, which gave me quite different results from
"nework not reachable" to
ending with the (default) 30 hops, with no reached server
and some quick responses, from which I picked the fastest one with the fewest hops.

then I searched this:
https://pkgmaster.devuan.org/mirror_list.txt
with the domain name of that reply.
I exchanged the found mirror with the "deb.devuan.org" in devuan.sources.

Now I get hits on all suits without any fail so far.

Maybe something in my WAN setup is blocking things (or my ISP does)

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:57:46 +0000

$ ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1104 Nov 12  2023 /etc/apt/sources.list_daedalus
 
/etc/apt/sources.list.d:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1603 Nov  7 21:21 devuan.sources

I have somewhat erratic behaviour on both
deb.devuan.org and
de.deb.devuan.org

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (rolfie) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 17:14:57 +0000

Updated my travelling laptop to Excalibur a few days ago. The upgrade went well what Devuan is concerned, have got some BIOS-related UEFI-hickup. Sources have been modernized today.

The original sources.list reads like this:

deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ excalibur-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.devuan.org/merged/ excalibur-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

No issues neither with apt nor apt-get.

Modernize generated two files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d with the following contents:

devuan.sources:

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-security
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-updates
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

devuan-backports.sources:

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur-backports
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

Backports was missing the key, I just added the line from devuan.sources. As well apt as apt get work:

# apt update
OK:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur InRelease
OK:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security InRelease
OK:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-updates InRelease
OK:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-backports InRelease
Alle Pakete sind aktuell.                   
# apt-get update
OK:1 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur InRelease
OK:2 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security InRelease
OK:3 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-updates InRelease
OK:4 http://deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-backports InRelease
Paketlisten werden gelesen… Fertig

Then I moved everything into one block in one file (devuan.sources) and set devuan-backports.sources to Enabled: no:

# Modernized from /etc/apt/sources.list
Types: deb
URIs: http://deb.devuan.org/merged/
Suites: excalibur excalibur-security excalibur-updates excalibur-backports
Components: main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

Same result with apt and apt.get as before, works fine.

I use geany to edit the files. And I avoid de.deb.devuan.org. I just use the general round robin. There were some problems a while ago, recently I haven't seen any issues.

# ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 14. Sep 2022  /etc/apt/sources.list~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  545  6. Nov 18:58 /etc/apt/sources.list.bak

/etc/apt/sources.list.d:
insgesamt 8
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 237  8. Nov 17:50 devuan-backports.sources
-rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 731  8. Nov 17:50 devuan.sources

I can't complain.

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (ralph.ronnquist) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 16:20:30 +0000

Can you post output of ls -l /etc/apt/sources.list*

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 11:42:54 +0000

I just started the notebook, which I change to excalibur just a few days prior to the release.
So the new style devuan.sources there worked flawlessly in that process.

I did not change anything with that sources and now an apt-get update gives me

E: The repository ' Release' no longer has a release  file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.

(sorry for not c&p this, it's only om tty0 of the other machine)

So still no idea how to fix this reliable.

EDIT: similar errors of other debian derivates mostly suggest missing/faulty repos.
Is there a way to find which actual repo I hit with:
(at any given run on it)

http://deb.devuan.org/merged
http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged

(of course only one of those are used in any attempt)

EDIT2 (after a bit of digging):

$ curl -Is http://deb.devuan.org/merged | head -1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
$ curl -Is http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged | head -1
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

As I understand it, that should be "200"
But then: why does it get the security updates and not the others?

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 20:45:16 +0000

Next PC, same problem.
This time I removed sources.list and sources.list~
And placed the new style devuan.sources in /etc/apt/sources.de/

Again only getting hits on security updates.

So the working solution from before seems to be coincidence not causality.
So I'm kind of back to square one.

(additionally the newest daedalus kernel seems to miss activating the USB subsystem on my chromebox. I have to start the old kernel to have a keyboard)

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 18:44:47 +0000

OK, maybe there is something strange.
As I disabled the daedalus sources, it looked like this:

root@kamin:~# ls -l /etc/apt/ |grep sources
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Mar  9  2024 sources.list~
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  5 19:30 sources.list.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1358 Jul  7  2024 sources.list_daedalus

I just checked it again on a hunch:

root@kamin:~# ls -l /etc/apt/ |grep sources
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Nov  5 14:10 sources.list
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    0 Mar  9  2024 sources.list~
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  5 19:30 sources.list.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1358 Jul  7  2024 sources.list_daedalus

Do I have a gap of knowledge here?
Where does the empty sources.list come from? Is that something generated from the sources.list~?

Anyways, deleting the two empty files, gives me:

root@kamin:~# ls -l /etc/apt/ |grep sources
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov  5 19:30 sources.list.d
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1358 Jul  7  2024 sources.list_daedalus

And now I'm getting hits on all repos/suits. Just bugs me, that I don't get the whole picture here..

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:10:04 +0000

No.
But that wouldn't explain why it showed the same behaviour with the old style of the sources file.

PC was off over night, I now checked the devuan.sources file and I deleted and re-insert the blank lines.
Then I get a working update.

For testing I changed back to the short variant with all suites in one line (only excalibur-security in a separat stanza):
apt-get update, again, give me only security.

changing back to the previous working one, I still get only the security updates.

very un-deterministic

EDIT: quite often I get this behaviour (there was about 5sec between the error and the next execution of the command:

root@kamin:~# apt-get update 
Ign:1 http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security InRelease
Err:2 http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security Release
  404  Not Found [IP: 147.229.176.19 80]
Reading package lists... Done
E: The repository 'http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security Release' no longer has a Release file.
N: Updating from such a repository can't be done securely, and is therefore disabled by default.
N: See apt-secure(8) manpage for repository creation and user configuration details.
root@kamin:~# apt-get update 
Hit:1 http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security InRelease
Reading package lists... Done

EDIT2: reboot or halt -p do not change the situation, still only a hit on security packages.

As http://de.deb.devuan.org/ should be e repo pool: might there be some repos not up to date?

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (ralph.ronnquist) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 22:35:35 +0000

That blank line between the stanzas, does that contain any spaces or tab?

Re: [SOLVED] dist upgrade to excalibur hits only security packages

dummy@example.com (mclien) — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:35:19 +0000

As for the file: I would too, say those are clean text files.
BTW: it's the other was around with me: I do not get anĺong with nano (might be it is, that I'm used to vi since my first encounters with *nix systems in 1997, Solaris and IRIX in that case).

Seems I have to try the split version of the sources file on the new machine for reasons that might stay mysterious...

UPDATE:
splitting the file was in vain:

# Devuan 6 excalibur
## The new style method of using repositories to install software.
## This /etc/apt/sources.list.d/devuan.sources is new style and location file
## The /etc/apt/old.style.sources.list contains the same as this.
## https://linuxconfig.org/ubuntus-repository-configuration-ubuntu-sources-have-moved-to-etc-apt-sources-list-d-ubuntu-sources
 
## Normal excalibur sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged
Suites: excalibur
Components: main non-free contrib non-free-firmware
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg
Architectures: amd64
 
## backports excalibur sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged
Suites: excalibur-backports
Components: main non-free contrib non-free-firmware
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg
Architectures: amd64
 
## proposed-updates excalibur sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged
Suites: excalibur-proposed-updates
Components: main non-free contrib non-free-firmware
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg
Architectures: amd64
 
## updates excalibur sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged
Suites: excalibur-updates
Components: main non-free contrib non-free-firmware
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg
Architectures: amd64
 
## excalibur security sources
Types: deb
URIs: http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged
Suites: excalibur-security
Components: main non-free contrib non-free-firmware
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/devuan-archive-keyring.gpg

still:

root@kamin:/etc/apt/sources.list.d# apt-get update
Hit:1 http://de.deb.devuan.org/merged excalibur-security InRelease
Reading package lists... Done