Re: uninstall some TESTING packages
On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 02:57:17 -0400, Craig Longman wrote:
> Roberto C. Sanchez wrote:
>
> >Craig Longman wrote:
> >
> >>well, my worst nightmare with a package managed system. i need to
> >>install qt-3.0.5 to get a fix for a daylight savings time bug, but was
> >>only available in the TESTING branch. so i added it in, installed it
> >>and the other packages that were required from testing, unfortunately a
> >>version of glibc and binutils and a bunch of other obviously system wide
> >>things, and now my machine is behaving very badly. i need to remove
> >>anything from the TESTING tree and replace it with the one(s) from
> >>STABLE. then i'll just get the source code for qt 3.0.5 and install
> >>that.
> >
> >First, it may not be possible to revert. However, if you need packages
> >from testing or unstable, you have a few options. First, you can check
> >www.backports.org, which has some very recent qt packages compiled for
> >Sarge. Second, you can try backporting the package yourself, which is
> >not difficult: http://familiasanchez.net/~roberto/howtos/debcustomize
>
> thanks, but i'm still stuck with a broken install.
>
> i can't figure out how to track down where the installed package came
> from. i think i can figure out how to force the 'upgrade' back to the
> stable version, but i can find no way of determining which packages
> installed on my machine come from testing, and which ones come from
> stable...?
You don't have to track down the packages yourself, apt can try to do a
downgrade for you if you convince it that you really want that. This is
not a thing that is normally done, so there is no guarantee for the
results. Considering the state of your system at the moment, you
probably don't have much to lose. One thing to note is that you should
first backup your own data if you don't do so regularly anyway. You
might have installed wrong versions (as far as the Sarge packages are
concerned) of some very elementary libraries, so there is no telling how
things might get screwed up with every additional disk access. Shut down
the system, boot from a rescue CD and make a backup of your important
stuff if necessary.
Afterwards you can create an /etc/apt/preferences which only has the
following three lines:
Package: *
Pin: release a=stable
Pin-Priority: 1001
This will tell apt that you want the stable branch for all packages, and
the priority > 1000 says that downgrades are acceptable to achieve this.
(more details: "man apt_preferences")
Then you can do an
apt-get dist-upgrade
and hope for the best. I never tried this myself, so it might belong to
the "on paper it made perfect sense at that time" category.
--
Regards,
Florian
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