New Security Updates module for Debian Users

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#1 Tue, 02/24/2009 - 18:00
Joe
Joe's picture

New Security Updates module for Debian Users

Howdy all,

So, with the release of Debian 5.0, a few Debian users have reported problems with Security Updates offering a huge slew of lenny versioned updates; and if the user chose to install them rather than question why lenny versions would show up for an etch system, significant breakage occurred.

This occurs when apt-get is configured to query "stable" apt repositories rather than etch repositories--so when the new "stable" version became lenny the repository changed out from under everybody overnight. This, I suppose, is documented behavior, but it certainly is a nasty surprise to install a bunch of packages only to find that a partial (and incomplete) distupgrade has happened and broken a bunch of stuff.

This new version of Security Updates attempts to respond to that bizarre behavior by ignoring packages that have a version that doesn't match the system it is running on. However, since the "stable" repository is now pointing to lenny rather than etch, you won't be getting etch updates to your system any more. We recommend you switch to explicit "etch" repositories, until you're ready to perform a proper distupgrade (which cannot safely be performed from a non-interactive tool like the Virtualmin or Webmin package manager interfaces--you must do major upgrades using an interactive tool, like apt-get on the command line).

This update is recommended for everyone running Virtualmin on Debian.