Re: Reduce scope to one distribution?

[Ed Cogburn <ecogburn@greene.xtn.net>]

john@dhh.gt.org wrote:
> 
> Morgan Fletcher writes:
> > What happened: I had a system pointing at unstable, then I realized that
> > unstable is not slink, but rather potato. I didn't want a bleeding-edge
> > distribution, so I pointed the system at slink (frozen). Now when I run
> > dselect, there are potato-era packages listed that aren't really
> > available to me, like kernel-source-2.0.36. Since apt can only see
> > packages in slink, I'd rather my package database reflected that. How can
> > I restrict the package database and/or dselect to just encompass slink
> > packages?
> 
> Sounds like you would like to run the nonexistent command
> 'apt-get dist-downgrade'.  So would I.


	If you are feeling adventurous, take a look at 'man dpkg'.  There
is a couple of switches that might be useful, like
--forget-old-unavailable and the --get-selection/--set selection
combo.  Please make a full backup of both /var/lib/dpkg/, and
/var/cache/apt, before tinkering.
	--forget-old-unavailable might do what you want.  The selection
switches might be use in concert with an update of the Packages
file.  Lets say you use --get-selection to get the list of
packages you have installed.  Now remove the data files in the
dpkg & apt dir and select Update from dselect (a clean rebuilding
of the data files).  Now run --set-selections so dpkg knows which
packages are already installed.
	Try the -forget-old-unavailable and/or --clear-avail first.  One
of these may help.
	There's bound to be a dpkg guru out there, somewhere.  Anyone?


-- 
Ed C.