This package conflicts with the clojure package because both provide a /usr/bin/clojure command, and the one provided by the clojure package (which was created by Debian and predates clojure-cli) is designed for use in standalone scripts via #!/usr/bin/clojure. clojure-cli's command, on the other hand, is focused on project development and always[1] downloads dependencies to ~/.m2 from the network (from clojars and mvnrepository) unless directed otherwise in ./deps.edn, perhaps like this: :mvn/repos {"debian" {:url "file:///usr/share/maven-repo"} "clojars" nil "central" nil} The package conflict ensures that existing systems can't be switched to clojure-cli's version unintentionally and begin downloading code in situations where that was be unexpected and unwanted. It's possible that we may eventually want to remove Debian's custom /usr/bin/clojure, so we recommend migrating relevant scripts to a more portable invocation like this at the top of a clojure script instead of #!/usr/bin/clojure: ":"; # -*-clojure-*- ":"; exec java -cp /usr/share/java/clojure.jar clojure.main "$0" "$@" [1] https://ask.clojure.org/index.php/8933/using-clj-offline