Re: archive

["Andrew M.A. Cater" <amacater@einval.com>]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2023 at 02:45:51PM +0200, ton01@ukr.net wrote:
> Hi! I'm interested in a question about the archive/old versions. The site https://www.debian.org/distrib/archive.en.html states that over time you stop keeping binary packages for older versions. Please tell me, over time, you remove binary packages from archive? Please give me the answers!

So - we don't always keep all the binaries for all the point releases, for example.

So when 11.5 is released and updates 11.4, the superseded binaries aren't 
kept around. 11.6 will update 11.5 and so on.

For *old* releases, you may find that the only binaries left are in
the CDs/DVDs. [If, say, you want Debian 4.0, then we've probably got 
copies of the CDs around.]

For the oldest releases, you may find that there's only the final release
archived (so, for example, without checking, for 5.*, you might only have
5.10 available - but that's OK, because that was the last version of 5
released).

This does make it hard if you come across an old machine that hasn't been
updated in several years or for some reason or another your machine is
pinned to a particular version - but, in general, you can update to the
latest point release for a particular version - so 5.10 - then update to 6.*, 
7.* and so on up until 11.6

Hope this helps,

Andy Cater
Hope this helps,