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Broken Packages All of a Sudden

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Gerowen
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Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#1 Post by Gerowen »

I've got a machine here running stable that was holding back 5 packages, even when I try using dist-upgrade. When I try doing apt upgrade or even dist-upgrade they just get shown as being kept back. One of them is libc6, and for some reason this machine is listing two conflicting versions, while my other machines aren't showing them, even though the apt sources are identical. The conflicting versions of libc6 are 2.31-13 and 2.31-13+deb11u2 . I manually swapped the amd64 version over to the +deb11u2 update, which is what my other working system has, but I still get conflicts when try to do the same thing with the i386 package, which is necessary for the steam package. I got a little further by uninstalling the steam package, but now when I try to reinstall it, rather than pull in the proper libc6:i386 package via dependency, I get warnings that it depends on specific versions of libc6:i386, all of which are older than what I have, but says it's not installable. When I try to apt install libc6:i386, it tries to remove my whole system; bash, gzip, apt, sed, grep, etc.

I'm not sure where these other versions of libc6 came from, there's no weird third party sources that offer the package and the couple of sources I did add for things like the Signal app are also on other machines that also have Steam installed and aren't having the issue. I've tried clearing my apt cache but at this point I think I'm about to just do a fresh install and start over because something, somewhere installed a conflicting version of libc6, and the process of removing it in order to replace it with the proper version is trying to break the whole system.

Any ideas?

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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#2 Post by arochester »

2.31-13+deb11u2 is the Bullseye package but vanilla plain 2.31-13 does not show as Debian https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libc6

Have you picked up 2.31-13 from somewhere else?

What does your sources list say, and what are the contents of sources.list,d?

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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#3 Post by stevepusser »

Maybe "apt policy libc6" will help.

Have you enabled multiarch for i386 on your amd64 install? Maybe your mirror is bad for the i386 libc6 and it's not getting updated, since both architectures should match versions.
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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#4 Post by Gerowen »

stevepusser wrote: 2021-11-10 21:49 Maybe "apt policy libc6" will help.

Have you enabled multiarch for i386 on your amd64 install? Maybe your mirror is bad for the i386 libc6 and it's not getting updated, since both architectures should match versions.
I did, because the Steam installer is an i386 package. It's weird though because all my other systems have identical apt sources and all have Steam installed, but didn't have this issue, so I have no clue where this mysterious alternative version of libc6 came from. I'm starting to think it might have come in as part of some other package she installed, but it's weird that everything else depends on it. It also might be a leftover from the fact that the system used to run Buster and I enabled backports and upgraded the kernel and several other items from there in order to get her wifi working and such, so it might be something that got broken in the transition from Buster w/backports to Bullseye without backports.

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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#5 Post by Hund »

I can highly recommend using Flatpak for Steam. Keeping that, err.. mess, away from your system is going to save you from a lot of headaches.
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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#6 Post by stevepusser »

No, Debian stays away from backports of libc6 in the backports repo.

The only updates for libc6 you'll get are security-patched updates for the same release--somehow the problem machine isn't seeing them for what I guess is the i386 architecture. Is it set to the same exact set of sources as the ones that don't have the problem?
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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#7 Post by Gerowen »

I ended up just doing a clean install on the machine in question because it was having other intermittent performance issues with her Intel CPU, and I wasn't sure if it was some configuration change I had made or what. This incident did remind me however that rather than add third party apt repos, it's a good idea to use flatpak for anything I can and avoid adding third party repos whenever possible. I remember the olden days of deb-multimedia breaking the hell out of certain packages.

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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#8 Post by sunrat »

Gerowen wrote: 2021-11-26 22:05... rather than add third party apt repos, it's a good idea to use flatpak for anything I can and avoid adding third party repos whenever possible...
Containerised applications like Flatpak are still 3rd party packages and have the same potential problems, plus a few new ones. Snaps are the worst.
I have five third party repos on my system and have zero issues with them. It just pays to pick your sources carefully. And occasionally make a sacrifice to the repo gods. :mrgreen:
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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#9 Post by Gerowen »

sunrat wrote: 2021-11-26 22:55
Gerowen wrote: 2021-11-26 22:05... rather than add third party apt repos, it's a good idea to use flatpak for anything I can and avoid adding third party repos whenever possible...
Containerised applications like Flatpak are still 3rd party packages and have the same potential problems, plus a few new ones. Snaps are the worst.
I have five third party repos on my system and have zero issues with them. It just pays to pick your sources carefully. And occasionally make a sacrifice to the repo gods. :mrgreen:
My concern was a third party apt repo uploading their own version of a package or library that replaces one provided by the system and perhaps breaking things or causing issues. The version from Debian might have certain customization options, might have certain dependencies and such marked, etc., that a version from a third party might not have. I figure with Flatpak, since it's all containerized and doesn't touch the system libraries or packages, it's far less likely to cause system wide conflicts, especially since I can also use things like Flatseal to more easily control what access privileges the apps do or don't have.

I've still got the apt repo for Brave, I've got the regular tarball version of Firefox since the flatpak has some weird font rendering problems, and I've got the apt repo for ProtonVPN, but that's it. I've removed all the others I had on my other systems just to reduce the likelihood of future conflicts like whatever in the world happened to my wife's laptop.

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Re: Broken Packages All of a Sudden

#10 Post by sunrat »

Gerowen wrote: 2021-11-27 02:02...I've got the regular tarball version of Firefox since the flatpak has some weird font rendering problems
The gods weren't satisfied with whatever you sacrificed to them then. :wink: :lol:
“ computer users can be divided into 2 categories:
Those who have lost data
...and those who have not lost data YET ”
Remember to BACKUP!

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