Re: upgrade to sid?
On Wed, 27 Nov 2002 12:43:06 -0500, Tim Verry wrote:
> If one were to put "deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable
> main contrib non-free" in my sources.list, uh, I mean one's
> sources.list, then ran apt-get upgrade and watched about 200 packages
> get upgraded, what exactly would the result be on so and so's
> previously woody Debian installation?
You'll get the more "bleeding edge" versions of some packages, there are
some packages that are available in unstable that are not available in
stable (e.g., GNOME2). If you're still fairly new to Debian (and it
sounds like you are), I would highly recommend going to "testing" before
"unstable". The "testing" section is basically the "unstable" packages
that are more or less known not to break your system, which can happen
with unstable. Anybody who's been running unstable for a couple of
years probably still remembers the big crash-bang that was the "pam"
fiasco.
> If a person had done this, is there any way to downgrade certain
> things back to earlier versions?
This is available after a fashion. It's not quite what you want,
though. Threre's no magic way to tell apt, "now make my sid system a
woody system". You can force downgrades on individual packages pretty
reliably, but doing an entire system is a pretty major task. It's not
really recommended, so you should make sure that you really want to get
the packages you want before you hit that second <RET> key after
'apt-get dist-ugrade'.
You should check out the docs for apt.conf and apt_preferences for some
of the more advanced options that are available.
Having said all that, I would have no qualms telling you to upgrade to
"testing" (aka "sarge"). The stuff that's there is at least as stable
as the some of the crap that goes into an RH *.0 release.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Stephen W. Juranich sjuranic@ee.washington.edu
Electrical Engineering http://students.washington.edu/sjuranic
University of Washington http://ssli.ee.washington.edu/ssli
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