Etch Downgrade

[der.hans]

Am 05. May, 2007 schwätzte gm5729 so:

> Apt generally does not handle downgrades too easily. You may have to

In my experience it does a great job with downgrades. You do have to
make some configuration changes and make sure you can get the packages you
need.

A few years ago I worked at a startup that was tracking unstable. No two
boxes were even close to being alike on identical hardware. I went through
and downgraded most of them to testing/frozen.

I had trouble with a script to use version= and don't remember whether or
not I used it in the end or just moved everything to whatever was in the
repository.

We had some packages that needed to come from unstable, so I pinned them.
The dependencies coming out of unstable was a pain, but it mostly worked.

The big issue was keeping all of the unused libraries. I used deborphan to
clean that up. aptitude and synaptic can now handle knowing if a package
was installed by name or as a dependency. If it was installed as a
dependency and all of the packages depending on it are removed aptitude
and synaptic will suggest removing the package. That's quite nice.

> look for your file in Old Stable (Sarge) and change your
> /etc/apt/sources.list for Sarge. Do realize though that there were
> changes made to X11 system from Sarge to Etch. They went from Xfree86
> to Xorg in those two releases. The libraries might not be compatible
> and cause even further degradation to your system.

True, the change from XFree86 to Xorg might be an issue.

ciao,

der.hans
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