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Discussion on: Getting Cozy With Debian Buster

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Incredible, thank you SO much for the write up! This is precisely what I was looking for, this config setup is the first thing I'll do when I get back home today.

NEVER install ubuntu PPAs

I was worried about that. Fair enough. To fix the damage, will it be sufficient for me to apt purge the offending package, remove the offending line from sources.list, then do an apt update && apt autoremove? Then, to actually obtain the needed package, they only provide Ubuntu .deb files and generic tarballs. When you run into a similar situation, do you just stick to the tarball or try to build a Debian package?

Haskell, rust, node, go and ruby

Asdf has been on my radar for some time but I never got around to trying it - Gentoo covered my needs out of the box here. I'm not opinionated about any of these except Rust, which I use rustup for. What's the benefit of using asdf instead?

their official packages

I noticed when I installed VS Code it actually added a PPA for me during the transaction, which is both awesome (I thought it was forever going to be up to me) and scary (I didn't even know a package could do that, and I don't recall apt letting me know it was taking that action). Have you run into packages where this behavior is problematic, or should that generally be the accepted solution?

Thanks again, huge help!

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flrnd profile image
Florian Rand • Edited

I forgot about those situations where only Ubuntu packages (or no packages at all) are available (hello AMD). In those cases I directly use the tarball, the only downside is that I have to update it manually. In my case, it's very simple because as for today I don't use/need any external software not covered by Debian packages. However, I doubt that you are going to run into any problem with just the Vulkan SDK, so, if it works right now, let it be, but next time try to avoid using Ubuntu packages unless there is no other option :).

Asdf has been on my radar for some time but I never got around to trying it - Gentoo covered my needs out of the box here. I'm not opinionated about any of these except Rust, which I use rustup for. What's the benefit of using asdf instead?

I didn't know about rustup! I only toyed with rust but nothing serious.

I use asdf because I'm lazy and having one tool to rule them all seems convenient, but I don't think it has any real advantage over rustup.

I noticed when I installed VS Code it actually added a PPA for me during the transaction, which is both awesome (I thought it was forever going to be up to me) and scary (I didn't even know a package could do that, and I don't recall apt letting me know it was taking that action). Have you run into packages where this behavior is problematic, or should that generally be the accepted solution?

Some Debian packages install in your /etc/source.list.d/ a .list archive with a repository. For example, in the case of VSCode: http://packages.microsoft.com/repos/vscode stable main. The main difference is that this repository is maintained by Microsoft instead of the community. Other examples, like Docker: https://download.docker.com/linux/debian buster stable.

These repositories tend to stay up-to-date, as a rule of thumb, if there is an official repo/package I install them over the stable packages unless I don't care about the version.

Don't break Debian wiki page has really good advice.

Lastly, Glad to help and welcome to the Boretown!

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

Heh, I made it maybe 90 minutes before breaking a core "Don't Break Debian" tenet. That's a great link, will definitely be more careful going forward - might just clean this up anyway and switch to the tarball to keep it clean.

I do think asdf sounds good in general - I use Rust a lot but the rest of those languages are more casual, experimental things for me so it's a perfect fit. Good stuff!

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andresdandrea

Great exchange! I learned a lot, specially with the first reply of @flrnd and the way to set up stable -> testing -> unstable repos. Thanks A LOT for sharing your knowledge Florian :)