Re: apt-get dist-upgrade doesn't downgrade to stable

[Lloyd Zusman <ljz@asfast.com>]

Dale Hair <dale@meridian-electric.com> writes:

> On Wed, 2003-01-22 at 12:22, Lloyd Zusman wrote:
>> Simon Law <sfllaw@engmail.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, Jan 22, 2003 at 06:15:53PM +0200, Mohammed Sameer wrote:
>> >>
>> >> [ ... ]
>> >> 
>> >> here's my /etc/apt/preferences
>> >> 
>> >> Package: *
>> >> Pin: release a=stable
>> >> Pin-Priority: 1001
>> >> 
>> >> and /etc/apt/apt.conf
>> >> 
>> >> APT::Default-Release "stable";
>> >
>> > 	Make sure you have stable in your sources.list.  Take out
>> > APT::Default-Release "stable";.  Then "apt-get update && apt-get -t
>> > stable dist-upgrade".  You should see it downgrade.
>> >
>> > Simon
>> 
>> [ ... ]
>
> I just tried exactly what Mohammed said he did and my testing/unstable
> machine wanted to remove 176 packages and downgrade 586 to stable.  I
> also tried it with apt.conf set to testing with the same results.  The
> preferences file seems to have priority over the apt.conf file.

Something is strange on my system.  I did the same thing, except I
wanted to downgrade from a mixed testing+unstable system to a pure
testing system.  I followed the same steps as above, except replacing
the string 'stable' with 'testing'.  Nevertheless, nothing got
downgraded (see below for details).

I know that I previously installed perl-5.8.0 from the 'unstable'
distribution, and that it is my default perl interpreter (I can tell by
running "perl -V").  But the following did not do anything, and after
these steps, I was still using perl-5.8.0 instead of perl-5.6.1 from
'testing' ...

contents of /etc/apt/preferences

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

/etc/apt/apt.conf was completely deleted

Then ...

 apt-get update && apt-get -t testing dist-upgrade

My output (after proper output from the "apt-get update" portion):

 Reading Package Lists... Done
 Building Dependency Tree... Done
 Calculating Upgrade... Done
 0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not upgraded.

So no downgrade (nor anything else) took place.

Does anyone know what else might be affecting this, besides the contents
of /etc/apt/apt.conf and /etc/apt/preferences?

-- 
 Lloyd Zusman
 ljz@asfast.com