A. L. Meyers <nospam.look@replyto.because.this.is.invalid> [2002-09-29 10:25:40 +0200]: > Thanks for the inputs, everyone. Now I've become really scared. Could > someone please post or point me to some verbose examples of > /etc/apt/preferences files? :-) Don't be scared. The current "testing" version is in a pretty good state all things considered. Why not just stay there? Even if you keep your sources.list file pointing to "stable" eventually _most_ things will catch up. So what you have already done, point back to stable, should satisfy your needs fine. One issue that may be problematic is that the security team will sometimes need to operate out of sync to the normal unstable, testing, stable flow of packages. Which means that is is possible for security updates to release for stable but not yet be available in testing. In those cases you would manually need install the updates if they applied in your case. Thy may not apply if you are behind another security domain such as behind a firewall and the problem is not germaine to you. Eventually when testing becomes stable at the next big release then you would be caught up again. Are you having a specific problem when running testing for which the list might be able to help? If so then it might be easier to address that issue. It will improve the next stable release. > BTW it would seem to me that apt developers should make downgrading just > as simple as upgrading. The problem is that time always moves forward. (And many of us also notice an acceleration component as well. Time keeps moving faster ever day.) Therefore there is an asymmetry to changing versions. Developers can make things backward compatible. But in the general case it is impossible to make things forward compatible. Moving from a newer version to an older version is not an expected situation. That problem is called forward compatibility, the opposite of backward compatibility, and in general cannot be handled gracefully. The older version has already been released and frozen in time at the moment that you determine that you need to handle a problem in the forward case. Only backward compatibility can be handled gracefully. The future knows about the past but the past does not know about the future. Bob -- The future is not what it used to be. It never was.
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