Re: [PLUG] un-upgrade in debian

[Sean Finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

On Thu, Sep 12, 2002 at 10:25:26PM -0400, Will Dyson wrote:
> Advice: upgrade to vorbis-tools 1.0 from unstable, rather than downgrading.
> 
> You can do this easily by adding the unstable archives to your 
> sources.list file and (important) setting a low (100<X<500) Pin-priority 
> on packages from unstable. You can do this by adding the following lines 
> to your /etc/apt/preferences file (copied from my woody machine)

if you're really keen on actually keeping your system
testing/stable, i'd suggest the following instead:

- add 'deb-src' entries for unstable to sources.list
- apt-get update && apt-get source package
- cd extracted-package-dir
- fakeroot dpkg-buildpackage
- cd .. && dpkg -i your-own-package-which-should-be-here.deb

this way you can't accidentally dist-upgrade (et c.) your entire
system to unstable, and you have a very clear list of the packages
that aren't standard for testing/stable (they even show up in their
own section in dselect, if you use that).  

i've done something similar to this on a stable system that needed
a single package from testing.  

also, if you instead decide to downgrade the package instead of upgrading,
i'd suggest a merging of two suggestions already posted:

apt-get install package=version
dpkg --set-selections package hold

note however that many mirrors don't always keep every version of
every package forever, so if you get a 'no such file' type error
you'll have to find the package yourself and use dpkg.

hth,
--sean

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