Debian package source treats "buster" release as a downgrade

[Jake Anderson]

I was recently trying to resolve package conflicts on a Debian system with the virtualbox-6.1 package installed on it and I had to force installation of version "6.1.18-142142~Debian~buster" which warned as a downgrade from "6.1.18-142142~Debian~jessie" even though jessie is the code name for the out-of-support Debian 8 and buster is Debian 10. I'm not sure if this is an issue for new installs or only because I have done so many distribution upgrades but I wanted to call attention to it. It seems like it's relying on the alpha sorting that presumes since buster comes first that it is an older version.

The issue that raised this for me is that the "jessie" version depends on libcurl3 and I wasn't able to install curl because it depended on libcurl4 and was attempting to remove virtualbox entirely on install. I can't think of more details right now but if there are questions I'll do my best to answer them.

[Jake Anderson]

I should also mention that I am using oracle-vbox.list in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ with the following in it:

deb ​http://download.virtualbox.org/virtualbox/debian buster contrib

[gombara]

This is not a correct place to report this problem. Your problem is seemingly about Debian packaging system.