apt package management

I recently had a sudo apt upgrade error along the lines of:

mariadb-server : Depends: mariadb-server-10.3 (>= 1:10.3.25-0ubuntu0.20.04.1) but 1:10.3.23+maria~bionic is installed

Basically the apt / dpkg package manger got confused with the old distribution installation. I suspect this only happen as I updated the distribution from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04. Basically the apt upgrade stopped working and repeated the above error. I could no longer update my system. To repair I need to do the following:

1. Backup the databases (not described here)
2. sudo dpkg -P mariadb-server to remove just the old package that was confusing apt package manager
3. sudo apt –fix-broken install to fix the broken package
4. sudo apt autoremove to remove the old packages
5. sudo apt install mariadb-server to install the full correct current package
6. sudo apt update to update the system package listing
7. sudo apt upgrade to update the install system packages that was no functional

After this I found upon checking the database that the original data was still intect, so I did not need to restore the data from the backup.

Upgrading to Debian 12 from Debian 11: A Step-by-Step Guide