On Fri, 2007.10.26 09:26, Jaime Herazo B. wrote:
> I'm inclined to just format it and be done with that mess, but he doesn't
> want to go that route since he'd have to reconfigure it all (i'd personally
> be willing to pay that price to be able to have the comfort of trusting the
> contents of the machine). Do you think it'd be good to give it a shot anyway?
> or would it just be a complicated way of delaying the unavoidable?
_I_ would probably reinstall just to be sure I had a pure Debian system, but if
it was someone else's system and they wanted to try upgrading, I would try it!
Back up stuff (do whether upgrading or reinstalling, of course!). I would
probably just get /etc and /home.
I find aptitude to be quite helpful with upgrading, especially with
complications like this:
Fix sources.list to what you want, run 'aptitude update', and run 'aptitude
keep-all'. Set all unofficial packages to automatically installed (uppercase
"M"), and then all dependencies/libraries. For the latter, I would open a flat
package list, limiting the displayed packages to those that are installed but
not auto-installed (using "~i!~M"). Then mark anything there that you don't
explicitly want installed as auto-installed. Aptitude should delete a bunch of
unnecessary stuff. Don't upgrade anything yet, just get rid of junk. Be sure
to preview everything before applying. Next start upgrading, and do just small
chunks of packages at a time. (This helps me keep things straight when using
aptitude.) If you have to use the dependency resolver, remember the reject
option ("r").
Hope this helps.
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