Happy Trixie Day

2025-08-17 UPDATE: added a comment about an upgrade issue I've encountered.

Hello everyone, Debian 13 (trixie) has been released. I just wanted to join the party from my little silent corner of the web and cheer the news.

Debian Linux is simply one of the most reliable piece of software I've ever used and this is a quality I've learned to appreciate with time. Since I moved my personal workstations and server to Debian in 2019 I've never regretted the choice. I use testing on my workstations and stable on the server. Never had a problem (that wasn't caused by me), Debian Linux just does its job and never gets in my way.

Now let's leave trixie bake a little while (just in case) then happy apt-dist upgrade to everyone!

§ A possible issue when upgrading between "testing" releases

An issue I've encountered during the update from the old testing ("trixie") to the new one ("forky") is because I had "trixie" hardcoded in some places.

First I received a few warnings about upgrading the channel (this is expected):

Error: Repository 'http://deb.debian.org/debian testing InRelease' changed its 'Codename' value from 'trixie' to 'forky'
Notice: This must be accepted explicitly before updates for this repository can be applied. See apt-secure(8) manpage for details.
Do you want to accept these changes and continue updating from this repository? [y/N]

So the first thing to check is that in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.sources there is no mention of "trixie" and everything is set to "testing".

But then apt failed to get some index files and returned a bit cryptic error:

Get:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian testing/non-free Sources.diff/Index [2732 B]
Err:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian testing/non-free Sources.diff/Index
  Couldn't find the start of the patch series

After a bit of research and crossing the information found, I've learned that there were traces of "trixie" also elsewhere:

# grep "Codename: trixie" /var/lib/apt/lists/*
/var/lib/apt/lists/deb.debian.org_debian_dists_testing_InRelease
7:Codename: trixie

/var/lib/apt/lists/security.debian.org_debian-security_dists_testing-security_InRelease
7:Codename: trixie-security

The solution is to delete these cache file and re-run an update:

# rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
# apt update