Re: fetching older packages?

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org>]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2003 at 03:23:56AM +0000, Monique Y. Herman wrote:
> Anyway, this brings up the question, how do I revert to an older version
> of a package?  A friend pointed out that I can just dpkg -i
> whatever.deb, where whatever is the older version, but I still have
> questions:
> 
> 1) Where do I find this older version? In this case it should be the
> version that was available on unstable right up until a few hours ago.

http://snapshot.debian.net/ will have it.

> 2) What does debian do about the dependencies?  In most cases, will
> having newer libraries be okay, or do I need to replace just about
> everything?

With the odd exception, newer libraries will usually be OK.

> 3) The python 2.3.1-1 package depends on the python 2.3 package depends
> on the python package.  How am I to understand these dependencies?
> Could I just remove the 2.3.1-1 package and still somehow have python
> running?

I don't get what you mean here. Could you explain in more detail?

> 4) If I do revert, how do I tell dselect (or apt-get or whatever) not to
> upgrade, and how do I know when the newer version is available?

Press '=' on the package in dselect, or 'echo PACKAGE-NAME hold | dpkg
--set-selections'. dselect will show you the held package among the
packages with newer versions available, and you can unhold ('+' in
dselect) when you think the available version fixes the bug.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                  [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]