This week I got to fix an issue on Debian Bookworm where non-free changed non-free-firmware after running apt update. While this kind of stuff happens less frequently than it does with Arch Linux, Debian still keeps me on my toes.
Fortunately, most of the stuff I run into on Debian is more of a warning and not
anything that needs immediate attention. I hate leaving these little warnings laying around. I have to assume that at some point they do catch up with you if left alone.
So after running apt update, I was informed of the following:
$ sudo apt update
# Bunch of unimportant logging about stuff that was fetch...
Fetched 5,137 kB in 5s (1,065 kB/s)
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
136 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.
N: Repository 'Debian bookworm' changed its 'non-free component' value from 'non-free' to 'non-free non-free-firmware'
N: More information about this can be found online in the Release notes at: https://www.debian.org/releases/bookworm/amd64/release-notes/ch-information.html#non-free-splitAlso, I forgot to mention, I’m running the testing version of Debian. My intention is to remain on testing until it becomes stable, and at that point, stay true to only running Debian stable moving forward. For stability’s sake, of course.
Then I followed the link presented to me and read about the tweaks necessary to resolve this. What was a bit peculiar though, was that I didn’t actually have a
source-list entry that they cited as the offending one.
Then I ran a quick rg and it seems that Spotify lists non-free on their source. Changing that to non-free-firmware was not the fix though, and that caused a bunch of warnings to show up, in addition to the aforementioned one.
Seeing as it seems like I was being presented this warning, even though I didn’t
have non-free in the mix for my actual Debian source, I went down the
alternative path.
The alternative was to create a new apt.conf file that would tell it to shut
up about things, so that I could live my life.
The easiest solution
Here’s a quick one-liner to create the necessary file and contents:
$ su -c 'echo "APT::Get::Update::SourceListWarnings::NonFreeFirmware \"false\";" > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/no-bookworm-firmware.conf'Afterwards, with the file created, running apt update quieted down, and I was able to proceed with an apt upgrade as per usual.
