Re: Downgrading a system to a particular distribution

From: Alf (alf_at_lanza-ti.com)
Date: 09/29/05

  • Next message: Alvin Oga: "Re: GRUB woes (install to hde)" 
    To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2005 09:16:41 +0200

    El mié, 28-09-2005 a las 10:10 -0400, Kevin B. McCarty escribió:

    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.

    > 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 <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
    > WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
    > GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
    >
    > 

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