Downgrading a system to a particular distribution
Alf
I started off from a stable Debian, and got to upgrade some packages
like evolution (and its dependencies) to testing distribution (etch).
Also, in order to install some packages that were only in unstable, i
had to install some dependencies from unstable branch.
Now my system is no very stable, and some applications crash now and
then. Because of this, i'd like to return to a more stable state. Is
there a way to uninstall all packages from unstable branch? I'd like to
get my system back to testing, say, or stable.
Any ideas would be appreciated.
TIA
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Kevin B. McCarty
> Now my system is no very stable, and some applications crash now and
> then. Because of this, i'd like to return to a more stable state. Is
> there a way to uninstall all packages from unstable branch? I'd like to
> get my system back to testing, say, or stable.
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 <kmcc...@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
Joe Smith
"Kevin B. McCarty" <kmcc...@Princeton.EDU> wrote in message
news:433AA43F...@princeton.edu...
> Alf wrote:
>
>> Now my system is no very stable, and some applications crash now and
>> then. Because of this, i'd like to return to a more stable state. Is
>> there a way to uninstall all packages from unstable branch? I'd like to
>> get my system back to testing, say, or stable.
>
> Downgrading in general isn't supported by Debian.
be able to just purge the packages from etc/sid, and then install them again
from sarge. By guess is that his system got hit by the C++ transition, which
would be a nightmare to downgrade from.
Alf
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.