[Discuss] reverting apt-get upgrades

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 03:16:46PM -0400, Tom Metro wrote:
> More importantly, apt is used for lots more than merely pulling updates
> from Debian stable. As you note, you could be running testing or
> unstable. (And you'd think devs working on unstable would be the ones
> highly motivated to solve this.)

No, devs working on unstable are highly motivated to fix the
bugs in the packages they are supporting. And, typically, they
hack on the unstable system, and have a stable box available for
actually doing things like sending mail and communicating with
people.

> In any case, the lack of responses indicates this isn't a feature most
> people are missing.

No, not really. You can have a fair assurance of safety: it's
called stable. If you want to take risks, you should know what
you're getting into. Especially, if you are planning on
installing new packages, you should have backups of the old ones
(or the system as a whole).

At work, we let desktop users do more or less as they will.
Servers don't get hand-hacked, they get deployed, with staging
environments and QA environments and automated tools that do
things the same way as last time, over and over.

-dsr-