Debian 11 "bullseye" released [LWN.net]

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 16, 2021 14:58 UTC (Mon) by mbarnes (guest, #42004)
Parent article: Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Seems like some steps got missed in the release process.

For one thing, the packages website still shows "buster" as stable.

I've always preferred my "/etc/apt/sources.list" to use "stable" rather than release code names, so upon a major release I can just "apt update; apt dist-upgrade". This time, however, after I thought I had upgraded and rebooted I still found myself with a 4.19 kernel. Had to s/stable/bullseye/ in sources.list for things to work properly.

Got it sorted, but as far as I can remember it's the first time a Debian upgrade didn't go smoothly in my 20-ish years as a user.

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Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 16, 2021 16:15 UTC (Mon) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link] (5 responses)

The packages site is full of hardcoding, it will get fixed at some point:

https://wiki.debian.org/SuitesAndReposExtension#packages....
https://bugs.debian.org/992258

It sounds like you may not have seen the prompt from `apt update` notifying you of the codename change for the stable suite. With apt there is an interactive prompt asking you to ack the change. With apt-get there is just an error and an option to ack the change.

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 16, 2021 16:20 UTC (Mon) by mbarnes (guest, #42004) [Link]

You're probably right. I'm still training my fingers to type apt instead of apt-get.

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 17, 2021 15:17 UTC (Tue) by clump (subscriber, #27801) [Link] (3 responses)

Debian old-timer that typically puts "stable" in /etc/apt/sources.list here. I didn't receive a prompt when running either `apt` or `apt-get` with an unmodified sources.list on a new Debian 10 install. Did I misunderstand your comment?

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 17, 2021 16:50 UTC (Tue) by docontra (guest, #153758) [Link] (1 responses)

If sources.list is *unmodified from the installation* (using an official installer image), it should use release codenames (i.e., buster for Debian 10) for stable releases and late testing images instead of stable/testing. In that case, you wouldn't get that message. On the machines I manage that I've yet to migrate to Debian 11 I didn't get any notification, but I did get a similar notification stating that bullseye had become the stable release. Personally, I prefer to keep the distro codenames in sources.list instead of using stable to ensure the distro version upgrade is on my terms (regarding timing), but to each their own :)

PD: Note that the security repo has migrated on debian 11 from stable/updates to stable-security ; luckily for me, on all the machines I've upgraded so far that was the biggest hurdle.

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 18, 2021 1:26 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Please note that if you have default-release or pinning setup, you will need to adjust your config to account for the new security suite name:

https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-no...

If your APT configuration also involves pinning or APT::Default-Release, it is likely to require adjustments as the codename of the security archive no longer matches that of the regular archive. An example of a working APT::Default-Release line for bullseye looks like:

APT::Default-Release "/^bullseye(|-security|-updates)$/";

which takes advantage of the undocumented feature of APT that it supports regular expressions (inside /).

Debian 11 "bullseye" released

Posted Aug 18, 2021 1:23 UTC (Wed) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

If you really had stable (instead of buster) in your sources.list (new installs usually get buster not stable), then when Debian released bullseye, apt/apt-get update gives an error due to stable changing from buster to bullseye, and that might not be what you expected. With apt you get an interactive prompt that lets you ack these changes, with apt-get you just get an error and can't update until you pass the --allow-releaseinfo-change option.

Debian 11 "bullseye" released - use of "stable" in release name for /etc/apt/sources.list

Posted Aug 16, 2021 17:02 UTC (Mon) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

This is not recommended now: it does cause a massive flag day when releases change. If you hard code the release code name, it will follow all through from unstable -> testing -> stable -> oldstable -> oldoldstable for 5+ years support. It also does mitigate against
links not catching up, too.