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

["Julian Mehnle" <lists@mehnle.net>]

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
> [...]

First, I think what Daniel Jacobowitz said is entirely true.  Why didn't you start with "testing"?

> 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.

Wrong.  If, on a "unstable" system, Apt sources for "testing" are also listed in /etc/apt/sources.list, you can always do a `apt-get -t testing install libc6` or `apt-get install libc6/testing`.

Or, you could create a file /etc/apt/preferences and pin the "testing" version of the package with a high enough priority.  See `man apt_preferences`.  Then do a `apt-get dist-upgrade`.

> 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.

This is probably one of the worst ways of rolling back few or even a single package.