Hi,
I've just upgraded my system to sid, and now I've decided to fall back on sarge. The question is, if I edit my sources.list to reflect this, and then do "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get dist-upgrade", will it do what I want, which is use sarge [ie downgrade some packages]?
tia,
andy

Geez, Ho, I don't know. It might be better just to wait until Sid gets promoted to Testing...

But seriously, I'd be interested to see how (if) this can be done. It might be that you have to remove the Sid packages one by one and install the Sarge packages. My first move would be to set the default distro to Testing, by putting this line:

APT::Default-Release "testing";

(note the syntax carefully; spelling counts and only the most confusing error messages will be produced, if any, and I sure wish there was a fscking <CODE> tag) in your /etc/apt/apt.conf file. This makes testing (sarge) your default distro from now on.

Many (? well, some anyway) of the Sarge and Sid packages are the same version, so don't give up hope.

And, don't forget, Google is our friend...

Cheers...

You can customize your distribution using apt-pinning. By pinning each source in your sources.list, you can control what packages have priority on you system.

Ooooo.... Very nice!

quite right, that's a great tool - didn't know about that. cheers, i used it to create a mixture of sid and sarge, which is what i wanted. cheers,

That's how I use it too. Sid is a little too bleeding edge for me.

I especially meant props for that link . The section on pinning is one of the parts of the otherwise readable APT HOWTO that left me scratching my head... Yes. like that.

Well, cool. I wished I'd've found that sooner. When I over-reached on Unstable, I just blew it away and started again from Woody, but stopped at Testing. Like you two, I now have a mix of testing and unstable. I only install from Unstable when there's a good reason. Erm, well, a reason at least .

I found that about a month ago, actually on June 15 to be exact (I posted here when I found it), and it has eliminated many frustrating hours for me including thumbing through the (sometimes a bit too vague) APT-HOWTO. It's especially useful for organizing all the sources I get from apt-get.org and my local mirror.