Hans, thanks for that but I am a bit confused following your instructions. Did you mean to I should remove the lines for 'stable' from sources.list? Or remove the lines for 'testing'? I am trying to get the packages to go back to stable.
I am more familiar with apt than aptitude. I managed to do part of what Greg recommended. I removed sendmail and sasl2-bin and reinstalled them from stable. That seemed to work fine, I have fewer testing pkgs installed now: $ apt-show-versions | g testing db-util:all/testing 5.3.3 uptodate db5.3-util:amd64/testing 5.3.28+dfsg2-7 uptodate libc-bin:amd64/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libc-dev-bin:amd64/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libc-devtools:amd64/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libc-l10n:all/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libc6:amd64/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libc6-dev:amd64/testing 2.38-11 uptodate libdb5.3t64:amd64/testing 5.3.28+dfsg2-7 uptodate libmilter1.0.1:amd64/testing 8.18.1-3 uptodate libsasl2-2:amd64/testing 2.1.28+dfsg1-6 uptodate libsasl2-modules:amd64/testing 2.1.28+dfsg1-6 uptodate libsasl2-modules-db:amd64/testing 2.1.28+dfsg1-6 uptodate libssl3t64:amd64/testing 3.2.1-3 uptodate libzstd1:amd64/testing 1.5.5+dfsg2-2 uptodate locales:all/testing 2.38-11 uptodate openssh-client:amd64/testing 1:9.7p1-5 uptodate openssh-server:amd64/testing 1:9.7p1-5 uptodate openssh-sftp-server:amd64/testing 1:9.7p1-5 uptodate openssl:amd64/testing 3.2.1-3 uptodate zstd:amd64/testing 1.5.5+dfsg2-2 uptodate so I thought I'd try the same process with db5.3, but removing db5.3 wants to remove a slew of packages: # apt reinstall -s libdb5.3/bookworm ... Selected version '5.3.28+dfsg2-1' (Debian:12.5/stable [amd64]) for 'libdb5.3' The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: acl apache2-data apache2-utils augeas-lenses avahi-daemon clamav-base colord-data git-man gnupg-l10n gnupg-utils gpg-wks-server guile-3.0-libs ipp-usb libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaugeas0 libavahi-core7 libcolorhug2 libdaemon0 libexif12 libgphoto2-l10n libgphoto2-port12 libgudev-1.0-0 libgusb2 libhashkit2 libieee1284-3 libldap-common liblua5.3-0 libnspr4 libnss-mdns libnss3 libopendbx1 libopendbx1-sqlite3 libopendkim11 libpoppler-glib8 libpoppler126 libpython2-stdlib libpython3.11 librbl1 librtmp1 libsane-common libsnmp-base libsnmp40 libssh2-1 libvbr2 mailutils-common python2 python2-minimal python3-augeas sane-airscan update-inetd usb.ids Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them Is there some way to get apt to reinstall a package such that it does not think it has to uninstall things which depend on it because it's being immediatly reinstalled? And for those of you telling me to have a backup, I do. I have booted a snapshot from about a week ago. However, to make that the live one and dump this one, it's not so easy but possible. That snapshot has only sendmail from testing. Hard to know what is more work, going down this route or making the other instance live. I'm starting to think about abandoning this and reconfiguring the backup instance.
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