Re: old entries in sources.list?
On Thu, Jun 19, 2025 at 16:57:11 +0200, Hans wrote:
> Which of one I should not do?
The advice is only to include sources for the current stable release,
and not for any older releases.
> I fear, that when deleting any entries of the previous release, it might want
> to deinstall packages ("applications" in this sense) from bookworm I want to
> keep.
If the packaging system wants to remove a package that came from
oldstable for dependency reasons, having oldstable sources listed
won't change that.
Some old packages (usually versioned libraries) are kept around forever
and don't cause any problems. They just sit on your hard drive doing
nothing, because nothing uses them or depends on them.
The only time it's advantageous to keep oldstable sources is if you
need to *add* something from oldstable, typically a library, in order to
run some compiled binary program that you got from outside of Debian.
In these cases, you're on your own -- there's no support for it. Also,
going back just one release may not be sufficient. You'll often end
up trawling through the archive of past packages to find a compatible
library, after you estimate what year the program was compiled.
Personally, I'd recommend replacing the oldstable sources with the stable
sources (but don't use the word "stable" or "oldstable"; use the release
name; I'm just using generalized language here). If it turns out later
that you need to add a package from bookworm on your trixie system, *then*
you can add bookworm sources (or download the singleton package directly
from the archive). Otherwise, there's no need to continue downloading
lists of packages from multiple releases. It's just a waste of your
disk space and bandwidth.
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