21 Nov
2022
21 Nov
'22
9:47 a.m.
Not sure what caused this weirdness, but I thought it best to make a report,
just in case it actually matters.
I was trying to find a desktop calculator that I actually like, and among
those that I downloaded was kcalc-trinity, which I've used before. But when I
downloaded my list of packages and dependencies, I kept getting an error
message:
Err:1 http://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/trinity/deb/trinity-testing
chimaera/main amd64 kcalc-trinity amd64 4:14.1.0~s244-0debian11.0.0+12
404 Not Found [IP: 37.205.10.16 80]
E: Failed to fetch
http://mirror.ppa.trinitydesktop.org/trinity/deb/trinity-testing/pool/main/…
404 Not Found [IP: 37.205.10.16 80]
E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try
with --fix-missing?
After trying apt-get build-dep, and then apt-get update, which did not improve
my results, it occurred to me to try changing my sources.list from Devuan
Chimaera to Debian Bullseye; and presto! worked like a charm.
Some may recall an earlier discussion (when Leslie was attempting a new Devuan
installation), I posited my opinion that there is probably no difference
between these packages when it comes to third-party repositories (such as
Trinity itself). From what I can tell, third-party developers thus far do not
create special Devuan packages, and most do not even acknowledge the
existence of Devuan, so Debian packages work just fine.
For the Trinity repositories, I assume that the link to Chimaera packages is
just a redirect to the Debian packages. Otherwise, this would be a
reduplication of effort and server space, If this is wrong, I expect to be
corrected by somebody who knows better. However, this seems like proof of
concept, since the package was available by changing to the Debian links.
I do know that Debian and Devuan packages definitely should not be used
interchangeably. When Devuan was first forked, this was almost true, except
for a few systemd-dependent items, but now they have diverged more and more.
These changes do not appear to have prompted third-party developers to create
packages specifically for Devuan, but I am sure that this will be changing.
It could be that this package alone is missing, or that there is a problem
with the link to this server, or that redirection is failing, or whatever.
But I did try several times, with the same bad result, and after changing the
lines in my sources.list for the Trinity repositories, everything worked like
normal.
By the way, I am using the PTB repositories now, following Slavek's recent
recommendation.
Bill