On Sunday 07 October 2001 22:04, Richard Cobbe wrote:
[snip]
> Before I do the upgrade, though, I'd like to ask for advice on general
> tactics people use for running testing or unstable and still maintaining a
> mostly usable system.
Testing seems to run pretty fine by itself. If you so much as suspect a
problem, you just do
apt-get install fred/stable
and see if it goes away; if it does, you'll probably want to
reportbug fred
possibly after reinstalling fred/testing.
> I know breakages will happen from time to time,
I can only think of one app in some months that I *had* to do the above with.
> but
> I'd like to minimize their impact as much as reasonable. Basically, I
> don't mind spending a little bit of time and energy dealing with issues,
> but I'd prefer to use my computer primarily to get useful work done, rather
> than constantly tweaking the OS and packaging system.
>
> So, what I already know:
>
> * Know the packaging tools. Besides just reading the man pages for apt,
> dpkg, and dselect, are there any other places I should go for
> information?
>
> * I know how to do the upgrade (edit /etc/apt/sources.list, then apt-get
> update ; apt-get dist-upgrade); I'm mostly interested in methods for
> maintaining the system after it's been upgraded.
Leave the stable entries in sources.list, just copy them and substitute
names. Then the downgrade trick will work.
>
> What I'm not clear on
>
> * If a particular package breaks, it would be useful to roll back to the
> last working version of that package (where possible). Trick is, this
> requires having the last working version of the package available for
> install somewhere. Do the Debian download servers maintain old versions
> of the package files, or would I have to keep copies of them all locally?
They're in stable. Or, if you use a local apt-mirror with the delete setting
set low, they're in there.
[snip rest; I have no good answers]
cheers, Rich.
