On 21/12/09, Andrew Sackville-West (and...@farwestbilliards.com) wrote: > On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:43:53AM +0000, Liviu Andronic wrote: > > In other words, if you update the package info and upgrade some > > packages that come with breakages, you're doomed to start hunting for > > a fix (in my case, this morning, without X and without internet). > > This is the purpose of the testing distribution, to test packages for > breakage so that bugs don't migrate into stable with the next > release. With all due respect, if you aren't prepared to deal with > occaisional breakage, then you should be running testing.
This is indeed true. If you are particularly worried about a package you can pin it, however. > > In the old times with Gentoo, breakages occurred more often than > > needed, but it was quite easy to revert an upgrade: each > > tree---stable and testing---usually contained several, similar > > versions of the package (much closer than in Lenny and > > Squeeze). That meant that whenever something went wrong after a > > package upgrade, I simply reverted to a previous minor version, got > > on with my work and waited for a new version to pop up. > > as I said above, you can often manually fix things using dpkg and the > old debs. Sometimes you'd have to force it. But to really make this > work, you have to keep careful tabs on what packages were upgraded and > cause the breakage. So far as I know there is no automated way of > doing this. You can also use the fabulous facility of snapshot.debian.net to get specific resources from a particular time in the past. To assist you in doing this you may wish to run a dpkg -l > installed_packages_$(date "+%d%m%Y").txt or something so that you know what version of what you had installed previously. Rory -- Rory Campbell-Lange Director r...@campbell-lange.net Campbell-Lange Workshop www.campbell-lange.net 0207 6311 555 3 Tottenham Street London W1T 2AF Registered in England No. 04551928 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org