[buug] Setting up Debian

[Nick Moffitt]

begin  Rick Moen Lives Three Hours from Nowhere  quotation:
> > As I understand it, apt-get will do an update against whatever I
> > put in source.list.  I initially installed everything using
> > unstable (woody) before I realized that secured packages were only
> > guaranteed against stable (potato) versions.  So I changed the
> > source and did an update... and nothing happened.  How can I
> > revert debian back to the potato packages using apt-get?
> 
> You know, I _used_ to know how to do this, but have forgotten.  You
> should ask on the debian-user mailing list.

	There may be a --downgrade function to apt-get.  Not sure.
The standard mechanism for apt is to use the sources to find the
highest numbered version of a package, and resolve deps until it has
you upgraded as far as it can go.

	An update will just refresh your local manifests to list the
packages available from the sites listed in sources.list.  It won't
actually upgrade or downgrade any packages.

> But are you _sure_ you want to revert to 2.2/potato?  Hardly anyone
> uses it, any more, because its versions are ultra-conservative to
> the point of lunacy.  And 3.0/woody is NOT the unstable branch; it's
> the "testing" branch, which has proven so extremely solid that it's
> exactly what's lead to 2.2/potato having hardly anyone using it.

	The reason for this is that it's the unstable branch, but with
a remarkably effective two-week quarantine.  If the package hasn't had
a grave or serious bug in the two weeks since it was uploaded, it goes
into the testing distribution.

	Because of this, too, you'll find that the bug fixes for
security problems tend to hit testing about the same time as the
potato updates.  If anything, the potato "secured" packages are just
back-ports of the things that worked right in unstable/testing.

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