On 2026-09-21 04:11:37 Mike Bird via tde-users wrote:
On Sun September 20 2026 23:59:22 J Leslie Turriff via tde-users wrote:
On 2026-09-20 23:30:55 Mike Bird via tde-users wrote:
You're mostly on bookworm and bookworm-security and bookworm-backports but you've also got Sid (Unstable) in there.
It looks to me like you're configured to prefer installed versions of packages but if a package is not installed to prefer higher version numbers, i.e. Sid rather than Bookworm.
That's right. openSUSE seems not to have a problem with that philosophy,
Hi Leslie,
(I also read your subsequent messages but I choose to reply to this.)
I was hoping to find a simple solution but I do not see one. You're in a complicated situation. Your direction to Debian to prefer old Bookworm packages if already present otherwise new Sid packages if not present places apt in an impossible position where it is not allowed to upgrade old packages to satisfy new dependencies. Also you have skipped over Trixie/Stable and therefore skipped various transitions and those skipped transitions now result in filename conflicts.
If you had followed Sid/Unstable you'd be OK. If you had followed Bookworm/Stable to Trixie/Stable you'd be OK. But you have a mixture.
I suggest you focus on one release. Trixie/Stable is the best choice.
A dist-upgrade from Bookworm/Stable to Trixie/Stable might work, but given the complexity of the situation, if I were upgrading your system I would expect to have to spend a day or two working around package conflicts as they arise. (It would depend how many Sid packages are present in the mix.)
If you decide to upgrade from Bookworm to Trixie be sure to read the release notes first. But even so, with Sid in the mix, you are going to encounter problems that others have not.
In future, if you really need one or two packages from Sid or Testing, you should use apt preferences to ensure that only the desired packages are upgraded to Sid or Testing.
--Mike
Okay. I've been just feeling my way through this stuff until, as you see, I've shot myself in the foot. To be honest, much of the terminology doesn't mean much to me, so I'm oblivious to many of their ramifications.
As Nik has suggested, I'll remove the reference to sid (a single line). Is there a command I can use to list all of the sid-based packages that are installed?
Leslie