[vox-tech] regaining stability in Debian

[Issac Trotts]

On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 06:16:40PM -0800, ace22b@myrealbox.com wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 29, 2002 at 05:54:17PM -0800, Issac Trotts wrote:
> > At one point I wanted an unstable package and so
> > apt-get brought a lot of other things with it.
> > Being new to all this, I haven't been sure how
> > to go back.  I'd be interested in knowing if there's
> > a clean way to do it, since it doesn't seem to work
> > to just change the sources back to stable.
> > 
> The clean way is /etc/apt/preferences
> 
> It is described in manpage  apt_preferences .
> 
> As a quick fix put there:
> 
> Package: *
> Pin: release a=stable
> Pin-Priority: 1001
> 
> 
> I am not quite sure if security upates in this context are "stable" , or
> something else, but you can comment it out after you've downgaded.

OK, so I updated sources.list to have stable entries and created 
the preferences file (which didn't exist).  Then I tried

  apt-get dist-upgrade

and it told me

  Reading Package Lists... Done
  Building Dependency Tree... Done
  Calculating Upgrade... Done
  The following packages will be REMOVED:
    [ long list including lots of things I don't want to remove ]
  The following packages will be DOWNGRADED
    bind9-host dnsutils libc6 libc6-dev libdns5 libfam0 libisc4
    liblwres1 libnspr4 libnss3 libssl0.9.6 mpack python-doc
    python2.1-doc python2.2-doc
  WARNING: The following essential packages will be removed
  This should NOT be done unless you know exactly what you are doing!
    apt libstdc++2.10-glibc2.2 (due to apt) base-files
    base-passwd (due to base-files) bash bsdutils coreutils
    debianutils dpkg dselect (due to dpkg) e2fsprogs gzip login
    libpam-modules (due to login) libpam0g (due to login) mount
    perl-base sysvinit util-linux (due to sysvinit) tar
  0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 15 downgraded, 620 to remove and
  0  not upgraded.
  Need to get 11.0MB of archives. After unpacking 1301MB will be freed.
  You are about to do something potentially harmful
  To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'

so I think maybe I missed a step...  

Issac