Re: How to "downgrade" to testing?
On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 02:45:38PM +0000, Jonathan Melhuish wrote:
> Although Debian "unstable" has actually proved pretty stable for me, I
> am aware that it is the development version and hence I cannot moan in
> the slightest if somebody breaks something. Upon further inspection,
> the "testing" distribution would seem a much better choice (this is a
> client machine behind a block-all firewall, so security is not a
> consideration).
>
> Everything procedure for "downgrading" that I have found so far seems
> rather elaborate - is there really no easy way to do it?
Not really, no. Debian packages include scripts which sort out details
of the upgrade by moving files around, making changes to configuration
files, and so on. When you install the old package, it doesn't know how
to cope with the newer version because that didn't exist yet when the
old package was created, so you have to fix up those details yourself.
There are other similar problems: I can think of one that's at least
arguably a bug in dpkg, but I'm sure that doesn't cover everything.
> As I say, I am quite happy with the stability of my system, so I would
> be quite happy to "freeze" it until newer versions make their way into
> the testing distro, if this won't cause problems.
That's probably simplest.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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