[sclug] Downgrading Debian?

[Simon Huggins]

On Tue, May 27, 2003 at 10:35:16AM +0100, Simon Huggins wrote:
> On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 08:33:12PM +0100, Will Dickson wrote:
> > I have a debian installation that I upgraded from stable to testing in
> > the usual way. However, I've since decided that this was the wrong
> > thing under the circumstances - not that there's anything wrong with
> > Testing per se, but the machine in question is a production server and
> > ought to be running Stable, as a matter of policy more than anything
> > else.
> You could sort of use pinning for this with an appropriate
> /etc/apt/preferences and with both stable and testing lines in
> /etc/apt/sources.list.

> Something like:
> Package: *
> Pin: release o=Debian,a=stable
> Pin-Priority: 1001

> Package: *
> Pin: release o=Debian,a=testing
> Pin-Priority: 99

Sorry to follow up to myself but I realised that this isn't perhaps
obvious.

If it does work, once you have a stable system again you should ensure
that the priority for stable is lower than 1000 and indeed unless you
apply a priority to security releases.  See apt_preferences(5).

apt-cache policy <pkgname> will help you see what apt is going to do for
each package.

I currently have:
Package: *
Pin: release o=Debian,l=Debian-Security
Pin-Priority: 900

To assign a priority to debian security packages.

I run testing but can install packages from unstable easily enough with
my setup and have the security line from woody in there (which is
admittedly mostly pointless as the versions in testing are often of a
higher version number).


Simon

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