Re: cahnging debian version

[Mike Fedyk <mfedyk@mikefedyk.com>]

Hendrik Boom wrote:

On Sun, Jul 24, 2005 at 04:30:11PM -0700, Brian Nelson wrote:
  

michael@etalon.net writes:

    

Quoting Alan Ianson <agianson@shaw.ca>:

      

security team.
              

Are you sure i cannot go back to stable ?
          

I don't think so, at least not without reinstalling. You can upgrade
        

from
      

Woody (old stable) to sarge (current stable) or from stable to testing
        

or
      

unstable. But there is no easy way to downgrade.

        

Yes, you can downgrade. You use the pinning fuction of apt to set
negative
pin numbers on packages.

http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Debian/downgrade.html
      

It's also completely unsupported and fairly likely to break your
system...

    

And given the number of packages he'd have to do it to,
not easy.
  

Actually these lines in /etc/apt/preferences would downgrade an unstable system to testing:

package: *
pin: release a=unstable
Pin-Priority: 711

package: *
pin: release o=Debian
Pin-Priority: 7221

I have done it with a few packages, but never with more than 15 packages or so.

That being said, if you are not on a critical system, and are willing to learn how to fix things if they break, it's a great way to get started. ;)