Re: how to downgrade: woody -> potato ??

[Rob Torop <robt@aya.yale.edu>]

Nate Amsden wrote:

> Rob Torop wrote:
> >
> > I upgraded from potato to woody (by changing sources.list and doing an
> > update then dist-upgrade).  Now I want to go back!  I replaced "testing"
> > with "stable" in sources.list, but I can't figure out what to do now to
> > get it to revert everything to potato.  Can someone advise me?
>
> maybe someone should make apt-get print out a big warning saying once
> you do a dist-upgrade you can't go back.. everytime ive seen this question
> asked(im not a testing/woody user or a sid/unstable user) the answer has
> always been no. apparently a new version of apt in unstable may be able
> to downgrade, but i dont think it would work unless you upgraded
> originally using that version of apt ..
>
> in short looks like u gotta reinstall if u want potato back..unless
> u want to grab a list of your installed packages and try to do
> a buncha dpkg -i --force-overwrite's but that is probably dangerous.
>
> nate

I just found this

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=debian++downgrade&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&rnum=4&seld=918198586&ic=1

In a nutshell it says that with apt-get > 0.5, one can create
/etc/apt/preferences looking like this:

Package: *
Pin: release a=potato
Pin-Priority: 1001

Then apt-get dist-upgrade will do a downgrade (with lots of warnings...). Or so
it would seem.  I haven't tried it yet...