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Re: A case study of a new user turned off debian



On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 03:05:56PM -0500, Greg Stark wrote:

> All he had to do was install an older version of libc6 and every other package
> would have been happy. All the infrastructure is there to do this, the old
> packages are all on the ftp/http sites, the package may even be sitting in
> apt's cache. But there's no interface for it.

  Sure there is, 'dpkg --install $foo.deb'.  Doesn't that do exactly the
 correct thing, even at the expense of downgrading?

  If not I'm sure there's a force option for it.

> The only interface for rolling back is switching the entire machine to an
> earlier distribution and telling apt to try to downgrade -- which is unlikely
> to work. And worse, every time you run apt it only downloads and unpacks
> *more* packages, all of which, of course, fail as well.

  In the general case where you have intermingled dependencies perhaps
 that is necessary.  However for a single package that shouldn't be the
 case.
  I know that you cannot remove an essential package and do much
 afterwards (I once resorted to editting the installed list of packages
 such that libc wasn't marked as being installed.  I had a lot of fun
 before getting there and afterwards was even worse).

  However if you have an alternative package you should be able to force
 its installation; even if you have to do someting tedious like download
 a source package and rebuild it ..

Steve
---
# Debian Security Audit Project
http://www.steve.org.uk/Debian/

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