How do I fix a "FrankenDebian"?

I'm trying to help fix a Debian installation that has ended up with a mix of Debian release repositories, aka a "FrankenDebian". This one has the bullseye and unstable repositories listed in /etc/apt/sources.list, if I recall correctly, where bullseye is currently the stable release. (I'm not in front of that computer right now; will edit if those details were wrong.) I've seen a lot of warnings about this kind of situation and the kinds of horrible dependency conflicts it will cause, but I'm not entirely sure how to get out of it.

The best I've found so far is https://gist.github.com/christianbundy/0d982648cbfe3dd4350cee8ab9e53828 but it's a little lacking in "guardrails"; I'd like to make sure that I can restore this system to working order without having to (say) reimage the disk. I know there's a way to get a list of installed packages and versions, and maybe even the cached .deb files, but restoring from that probably has its own pitfalls.

So, what procedure should I use that will allow me to get the system to a working state, but will also be amenable to backing off and trying again later?

is a duplicate

This question has been asked before and has already been answered. It should be marked as a duplicate.

Please enter the URL of the proposed duplicate in the details field below.

not constructive

This question cannot be answered in a way that is helpful to anyone. It's not possible to learn something from possible answers, except for the solution for the specific problem of the asker.

Communities

How do I fix a "FrankenDebian"?

3 comment threads

0 answers