Getting started w/ Debian

[nelson at bignachos.com (Brian Nelson)]

Brendan <mailinglist at endosquid.com> writes:

>> Simply setting the sources.list and updating does *NOT* automatically
>> pin you to a certain Debian release.  APT will not automatically remove
>> packages that you previously installed but are no longer available in
>> whatever distribution you've switch to, nor will it downgrade packages
>> to the current version.
>>
>> If you try to use APT pinning and force the downgrades, you'll be even
>> more screwed...
>
> I just haven't run into this. Granted, I've only been running Debian in a 
> production environment for a year now on dozens on machines. I'm sure 99% of 
> the Debian userbase makes me look like a newbie, but doing a dist-upgrade 
> should change you to running that "dist"...

Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way.  "dist-upgrade" is
rather poorly named since all it's really just a little more aggressive
"upgrade".  It doesn't generally have concept of a "dist"; it just looks
at package versions and installs the highest version available.  In
fact, the only difference between a "apt-get upgrade" and a "apt-get
dist-upgrade" is that the dist-upgrade is allowed to install new
dependency packages and remove conflicting packages, whereas the
"upgrade" is not allowed to modify the installed package set.

APT pinning can be used to "pin" to a certain distribution source, but
it's not really as nice as it may seem.  It's rather complicated and
easily abuse.  I strongly recommend against trying it unless you really
know what you're doing.

-- 
You win again, gravity!