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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

I migrated to daedalus from debian/testing, and while I've fixed some resulting dependency issues with packages that are newer than what's in daedulus, I'm still running into issues with packages that are "too new", causing some existing packages in daedalus to be uninstallable unless I first track down each dependency that's "too new" and remove them manually.

Is there a way to force apt to auto-downgrade packages that are newer than what's in daedalus? That would ease a lot of this pain.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,169  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

... migrated to daedalus from debian/testing ...

Well, the Debian equivalent to Daedalus is Bookworm, not Trixie/Testing. A new installation of Daedalus would solve all issues.

golinux

Administrator

Registered: 2016-11-25

Posts: 3,316  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

Do have a look at this page to understand the Devuan/Debian release relationships:

https://www.devuan.org/os/releases

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quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

I know what I did is unsupported / foolish / whatever.  But I got it to (mostly) work.  So now I'm just looking for a way to clean things up.  Reinstalling isn't really an option since this is my primary PC.

aluma

Member

Registered: 2022-10-26

Posts: 646  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

Example using synaptic, first disable unnecessary repositories and reload them.

rolfie

Member

Registered: 2017-11-25

Posts: 1,169  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

If I am not mistaken there was an older thread in the forum with a similar issue. All I remember there was no easy way to achieve that what you want, it was a package by package undertaking.

aluma

Member

Registered: 2022-10-26

Posts: 646  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

I had a similar problem (dist-up* didn’t help), of course it’s better to reinstall, it’s faster and the result is without surprises. If there is a separate /home partition, this is quite easy to do. And if not, then it's time to do that too.

delgado

Member

Registered: 2022-07-14

Posts: 211  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

"apt pinning" is a possibility. A priority of at least 1001 allows package downgrade.
In your case, It would be pinning the daedalus packages to 1001 and then doing the usual upgrade.
I've done that a few times, it usually just works.

# cat /etc/apt/preferences
Package: *
Pin: release n=daedalus
Pin-Priority: 1001

# apt update
# apt upgrade
# apt dist-upgrade

quickfur

Member

Registered: 2023-12-14

Posts: 431  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

Cool, sounds like apt pinning is what I'm looking for. Will try it and see.

zapper

Member

Registered: 2017-05-29

Posts: 967  

Re: Getting rid of "frankenstein" packages

Always remember not to mix debian repos with ubuntu repos, or similar. Repos that only have one or the other, are a different case if they are from unofficial repos, but still be careful of what depends get pulled in.

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