It appears that I have done something wrong, I commented out my regular repos and only used the two that were posted above. . . Then attempted to search like I always have (probably wrong) " apt search mesa" and I just assumed that with the experimental stuff being there it would have shown a newer version. Can you please give me the command for searching "experimental" ? Thank you.

This is what returns when I type the above:

mesa-common-dev:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 20.3.4-1
  Version table:
     20.3.4-1 500
        500 http://deb.devuan.org/merged chimaera/main amd64 Packages

(I"m sorry, I misread the first post about adding DEBIAN experimental to my sources.list.... )

I've sorted the mess out. Thank you for the help. . .

I've never fully understood the apt pinning, can you provide a comprehensive tutorial link?

Open the file located at:

/usr/share/perl5/Alien/Package/Deb.pm

Change:

                 dh $@
To:

                 dh \$\@

Should look like:

# debian/rules for alien

PACKAGE=\$(shell dh_listpackages)

%:
    dh \$\@

override_dh_clean:
    dh_clean -d

*** This totally fixed the issue, if someone needs or wants to see the source it was found at https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugrepo … bug=983492
Many thanks, dice, for pointing me in the right direction.

I'm using alien to convert tar.bz2 into .deb packages...
So there isn't an install "package" yet.

I have 4 other computers that I need to install these packages on.

I also tried installing directly from alien with "-i" and i still get error 25.

***Also, all the packages are x86_64***

The I keep several versions as backups. Ones that previously converted into .deb successfully are no longer doing that. I don't recall when it took place and didn't think about it when installing updates, but something has changed in the last ~month that alien no longer functions the way that it did previously.