Re: Downgrading a system to a particular distribution
El mié, 28-09-2005 a las 10:10 -0400, Kevin B. McCarty escribió:
Thanks for your help Kevin. The procedure you outlined (below) for
downgrading just worked ok for me. I understood it and i think it makes
sense. I did not know how to get a list of packages from each branch,
like the one given by apt-show-versions.
> Downgrading in general isn't supported by Debian. If you want to try
> anyway, though, here are some guidelines. I've done this before to take
> a computer with an old version of Sid down to Sarge. I did this before
> the XFree86 -> Xorg transition happened; things will be more difficult now.
>
> - Remove all lines referencing sid or unstable from
> /etc/apt/sources.list. If you want to downgrade all the way to stable,
> also remove all lines referencing etch or testing.
>
> - Run apt-get update
>
> - Install the package apt-show-versions. Run the following command, and
> it will tell you all the packages installed on your system that are
> newer than the version in testing (or stable, depending on how far you
> want to downgrade):
>
> apt-show-versions | grep 'newer than version in archive'
>
> - To downgrade something that shows up in this list, run "apt-get
> install <package>/stable". For instance, to downgrade the "tar"
> package, you would do "apt-get install tar/stable". Note that you may
> have to replace "stable" with "sarge" depending on which you refer to it
> as in your /etc/apt/sources.list file. If you only want to downgrade to
> testing, use "etch" or "testing" instead, of course.
>
> - Downgrade applications first, then libraries. In general, if package
> A is an application depending on libraries B and C, and library B
> depends on library C, then you want to downgrade them in the order
> A,B,C. This is because an older application can use a newer library (so
> long as the soname has not changed), but a newer application may not be
> able to use a library older than the version against which it was compiled.
>
> - Sometimes you may have to downgrade several packages at once (e.g.
> "apt-get install libgtk2.0-0/stable libgtk2.0-dev/stable") in order to
> work around versioned dependencies. You'll know this is necessary if
> APT wants to remove packages or complains about packages having unmet
> dependencies.
>
> - Some packages may exist in sid but not in testing/stable. You can
> find them with
>
> apt-show-versions | grep 'No available version in archive'
>
> If you don't want them, try "apt-get remove"ing them to see what
> happens. If APT wants to remove a bunch of other things, let it -- keep
> a list of what gets removed, then reinstall it from stable.
>
> - If at any point you run into a problem like maintainer scripts failing
> in non-trivial ways, or segfaults, or something like that, back up all
> your data and reinstall from scratch -- it's probably easier.
>
> Good luck,
>
> --
> Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
> WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
> GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
>
>
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