Re: Debian Downgrade question

[James Strandboge <jamie@strandboge.com>]

On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 16:35 -0800, Bill MacAllister wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On one of the debian systems I manage I installed sarge before it was moved 
> to stable by referening testing in my sources.list.  I completely forgot 
> about this and recently issued an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade.  The 
> system continues to work, but has trouble booting now.  I would like to 
> revert to the stable tree at this point.  What will happen if I just modify 
> the sources.list and issue an apt-get update; apt-get upgrade at this 
> point?  Is apt-get smart enough to go back like list?

Logout of X if you are in it.

Adjust /etc/apt/sources.list to use 'stable' or 'sarge'.

Add this to /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 1001

Run 'apt-get update'

Run 'apt-get -u dist-upgrade'

That last one will downgrade your machine to stable.  Once it is done,
you should reboot.

You will probably have a number of packages left over from testing that
don't exist in sarge, so use deborphan to find out which ones they are,
and manually remove them (or run 'deborphan | xargs dpkg --purge').

I have done the above a couple of times, and if you are running gnome,
you may also want to run:
apt-get remove --purge libglib2.0-0
apt-get install gnome gdm

The first command will pull out almost all gnome apps and libraries, and
the second installs them again.  IIRC nautilus in particular had
problems with downgrading.

-- 
James Strandboge
jamie@strandboge.com