On Thu, Jun 14, 2007 at 05:25:17PM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote: [...] > > The advice I've found on the list gave methods that were good for > downgrading a package, or the whole system, but seem awkward with a > whole set of packages (I realize with enough time I could write a script > that would get all the package names and do it for me). I tried this > in /etc/apt/preferences > Explanation: Downgrade to X I can use > Package: xserver-xorg-* > Pin: release a=etch > Pin-Priority: 1200 > > Package: xorg-* > Pin: release a=etch > Pin-Priority: 1200 > > but it didn't seem to work (and the man page doesn't exactly suggest it > should). I was using aptitude. what did it do? in fairly recent history (say 6 months) we've discussed the release names and their usage in the apt system. I don't recall the outcome of that discussion and am too lazy to look. But a quick scan of the apt_preferences man page suggests (since the examples only use this) that you need to specify Pin: release a=stable instead of "etch" > > Before that I tried selecting the xserver-xorg meta-package and > downgrading it, but it didn't take anything else with it (since it > probably has a lot of >= requirements, the newer ones make it happy > too). > > I considered removing X, but that poses the same problem of identifying > all the packages and the extra problem that it would probably remove > most of my packages with it. yeah. That's not fun, though if you go outside of aptitude and use apt-get, you could probably remove all of X without taking all of your DE with it. apt-get is not as poicky about leaving orphans, and your options to force behavior are better. > > Any other ideas? When running testing, I think it is very wise to keep local backups of your debs from /var/cache/apt/archives so that you can easily downgrade. Especially once testing has moved more than a couple versions from stable. If you've moved say 6 ot 8 versions from stable and then try to downgrade parts of your system to stable, you're more likely to run into problems. If you just need to back up one version, its nice to have the .debs sitting around. IOW, avoid clean and auto-clean and have plenty of /var space. A
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