this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Third party package mechanism is fundamentally broken in Ubuntu (and in Debian).
Third party repos should never be allowed to use package names from the core repos. But they are, so they pretend they're core packages, but use different version names, and at upgrade time the updater doesn't know what to do with those version and how to solve dependencies.
That leaves you with a broken system where you can't upgrade and can't do anything entirely l eventually except a clean reinstall.
After this happened several times while using Ubuntu I resorted to leaving more and more time between major upgrades, running old versions on extended support or even unsupported.
Eventually I figured that if I'm gonna reinstall from scratch I might as well install a different distro.
I should note I still run Debian on my server, because that's a basic install with just core packages and everything else runs in Docker.
So if you delegate your package management to a completely different tool, like Flatpak, I guess you can continue to use Ubuntu. But it seems dumb to be required to resort to Flatpak to make Ubuntu usable.
You know you can prevent that with proper apt pinning right?
I'm not sure how that would help. First of all, it would still end up blocking proper updates. Secondly, it's hard to figure out what exactly you're supposed to pin.
It does not block proper updates. You might be thinking of held packages that's not the same thing at all. It isn't hard to figure out what you want to pin, you can just pin a hole third party repository at -1 except the specific package(s) you want to install and then there's no chance of that repository overriding a package from the distro's repository.
https://douglasrumbaugh.com/post/apt-pinning/
https://rmmmax.com/apt-get-pinning/
https://wiki.debian.org/AptConfiguration#Prevent.2Fselective_installation_from_a_third-party_repository
Interesting, I'll keep it in mind.
Still not sure it would help in all cases. Particularly when 3rd party repos have to override core packages because they need to be patched to support whatever they're installing. Which is another very bad practice in the Ubuntu/Debian world, granted.
You can still select just those packages out of their repos. Obviously that can get tedious if there are a lot of them. But that's pretty rare and at that point it's worth asking, is that software really worth it? Is there a better installation method? Could it live in a cheoot/container?
But that's not just in the Apt world, any system wide install would behave like that.
It's not an issue on Arch & derivates, due to the simple fact I mentioned above: third-party (AUR) packages are never allowed to use the name of an official package.
If a third-party package was already using a name that a new official package wishes to use, users are required to willingly uninstall the third-party package in order to be allowed to install the official one, and can never re-install the third-party package unless it changes its name.
It also helps that there's only one third-party repo (the AUR) so it prevents name overlaps among third-party packages. Although that's of secondary importance since it can be bypassed by crafting custom packages locally.
I appreciate the difficulty of enacting such a rule on Debian or Ubuntu now, considering the vast amount of already existing, widely established third-party repos, and also the fact that Debian official repos contain 3-4 times as many packages as Arch official repos. Which is why I think there's no way to fix this aspect of Debian/Ubuntu anymore.
I'm not saying that makes them unusable... but I believe that anybody who uses them should be [made] aware of this caveat. It's not readily apparent and by the time it bites a new user she's probably already invested a couple of years in them.