On Tue 14 Mar 2023 at 08:38:09 (-0400), Greg Wooledge wrote: > On Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 01:16:51PM +0100, Loris Bennett wrote: > > So the problem is with the original 'sources.list', namely > > > > # See https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList for more information. > > deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free > > deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye main contrib non-free > > > > deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib non-free > > deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-updates main contrib > > non-free > > > > deb http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security main > > contrib non-free > > deb-src http://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bullseye-security > > main contrib non-free > > > > I didn't change the URLs and only added the section 'main' and
contrib, rather than main, I hope. > > 'non-free', so how come this is broken just for me? Chance, perhaps. I appears the lists were stale, but you were seeing a fresh archive. How frequently do you update your lists. (Every three hours, with a cron job, in my case.) > deb.debian.org is an extra super fancy redirection thingy that uses > "SRV" records instead of ordinary round-robin DNS. Most of the time, > it works, for most people. > > But every once in a while, you get redirected to a mirror that's out > of date. Unfortunately, when that happens, it's really damned hard > to figure out that this is happening, or how to fix it. > > In fact, the only way I know how to force it to use a different mirror > is exactly what I recommended here -- stop using deb.debian.org entirely. > You could try going back to it in a week or two, and maybe the mirror > it's using for you will be up to date, or you'll get a different mirror. > Or, you could stick with your ftp.COUNTRYCODE.debian.org mirror set if > it's working well for you. > > The country code mirror sets aren't immune from staleness issues either. > There've been plenty of times when one of them has been out of date, > and people have been advised to use a different country code for a > while, until the mirrors get fixed. So, just keep an eye out for this > kind of problem no matter what mirrors you use. If you run into this problem, you can make things easier the next time by placing your current sources.list file into /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ and keep an alternative version there as well. For example: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deb.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/france.backup and on a bad day, you rename them to: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/deb.backup /etc/apt/sources.list.d/france.list APT only reads the .list filename. Disadvantage: keeping them in sync, but usually there's very little need for any changes to be made. Cheers, David.
