Today I downgraded from Debian Sid to Etch.
It was fun living on the edge for the last 6 months but I wanted to stabilize the server. Everyday it’s a rush of new packages hitting the unstable branch and at times it breaks your system.
Debian Etch will be the new stable branch come December, so I thought I’d get a head start on testing my web apps against it’s stable LAMP platform.
It’s not recommended to downgrade versions in Debian but it’s possible. After reading everything I could get my hands on, I took the plunge.
Changed my /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main contrib non-free
deb http://security.debian.org etch/updates main contrib non-free
Did some apt pinning in /etc/apt/preferences:
Package: *
Pin: release a=testing
Pin-Priority: 1001
Then issued the commands:
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
I had a problem with sysvinit-utils, it was causing the upgrade to crash, I ended up removing it with dpkg. I started the dist-upgrade process again and it finished without a hitch this time. Removed the pinning from the preferences file, it’s not needed after the upgrade.
I ran apt-show-versions, a perl script that outputs the status of all installed packages. I looked it over and the majority of the packages had an /etch uptodate status, those packages that said installed: No available version in archive, I went ahead and removed.
Rebooted, kept my fingers crossed, no errors to report.
I turn the knobs to the left to the right
Try to draw myself out of this crazy life
But then I gave control to the picture
Over to the one who makes the art richer