Even though I haven’t upgraded from Debian 10 “Buster” to Debian 11 “Bullseye”,
I’ve already been bitten by a bug.
The bug showed up in one of my local Docker containers that is running Debian
- Upon starting the container, I run
apt-get updateand was faced with this
nasty thing:
D: Repository 'http://security.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates InRelease' changed its 'Suite' value from 'stable' to 'oldstable'
D: Repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian buster InRelease' changed its 'Suite' value from 'stable' to 'oldstable'
D: Repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates InRelease' changed its 'Suite' value from 'stable-updates' to 'oldstable-updates'
Error: Process completed with exit code 100.
I’ve survived the release of new versions of Debian in the past, but have never
run into this particular error. As with many things, checking the manpage
helped out immensely.
I simply ran man apt-get and then did a search / for the keyword suite.
The first hit gave me some insight to a command-line argument I wasn’t aware of:
--allow-releaseinfo-change
Allow the update command to continue downloading data from a repository which changed its
information of the release contained in the repository indicating e.g a new major release.
APT will fail at the update command for such repositories until the change is confirmed to
ensure the user is prepared for the change. See also apt-secure(8) for details on the
concept and configuration.
Specialist options (--allow-releaseinfo-change-field) exist to allow changes only for
certain fields like origin, label, codename, suite, version and defaultpin. See also
apt_preferences(5). Configuration Item: Acquire::AllowReleaseInfoChange.
I tacked the argument to my existing command:
apt-get update --allow-releaseinfo-change
And I was back to being productive!
Best as I can tell this only affects older installs of Debian 10 as when I tried
it out with a newly installed Debian 10 Docker image, the problem no longer
existed.
