Re: [SOLVED] Re: old entries in sources.list?
On Thu, Jun 19, 2025 at 2:59 PM Hans <hans.ullrich@mail.de> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> Thank you very much for your very usefull informations. It answers all my
> questions and worries I had.
>
> So, "best" way is to remove the old entries and use only trixie-related ones.
>
> This litle question/issue is fully solved and can safely be closed.
>
> I am looking forward to trixie and are very excited to it!
>
> Best regards and thaky you all for your help!
It might be worth mentioning that if the package owns sources.list,
then you should not edit it. You should allow the package maintainer
to edit or replace sources.list. Place your changes in
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/.
But again, I do not know who or what owns sources.list. (And a quick
read of sources.list(5) did not say whether you should modify
sources.list).
Jeff
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