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How to migrate from sid to stable?

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  How to migrate from sid to stable? Pétùr <peturvilj@gmail.com> - 2017-06-13 12:10 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Hans <hans.ullrich@loop.de> - 2017-06-13 13:00 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org> - 2017-06-13 13:10 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Fungi4All <fungilife@protonmail.com> - 2017-06-13 13:30 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Dejan Jocic <jodejka@gmail.com> - 2017-06-13 13:30 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? songbird <songbird@anthive.com> - 2017-06-13 14:00 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Boyan Penkov <boyan.penkov@gmail.com> - 2017-06-13 15:00 +0200
    Re: How to migrate from sid to stable? Patrick Bartek <nemommxiv@gmail.com> - 2017-06-13 21:40 +0200

#182122 — How to migrate from sid to stable?

Hi everyone,

I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.

If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.

I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
a while is a good idea.

I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
there one?

Pétùr

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#182124

Am Dienstag, 13. Juni 2017, 12:05:19 CEST schrieb Pétùr:
Hi Petur, 

this is not an easy task! The way, I would do means a lot of manual work to do 
and to be courious. And maybe you will wait for the 17th of June, then testing 
will be stable!!!

Take care of having an image of the drive available so you can change back, if 
something does not work!

Steps:

1. So first of all edit sources.list to the stable repo.

2. Do aptitude clean, then start aptitude (ncurses) and do an update.

3. Now go through all the packages, and set the version to the version in 
stable.

4. After you have finished all the settings, reinstall the packages. It will 
downgrade.

5. Recheck, if everything was downgraded. I suppose, you will need several 
runs.

-----

Second idea:



1. Make a copy of the complete filesystem  to another drive. Must be ext2 or 
higher!

2. Read/Get actually installed package list by using: 
dpkg --get-selections "*" >mypackagelist.txt
Save this file on an external drive.

3. Install debian/stable new.

4. get and install packagelist of old system from "mypackagelist.txt"
dselect update
dpkg --set-selections <mypackagelist.txt
apt-get -u dselect-upgrade

5. copy necessary files from backup of old system from "/etc" to new installed 
system "/etc". Use rsync,, so permissions are kept!

6. I suppose, some finetuning has to be done.

7. Create users in the same manner as on the old system and rsync /home from 
old to new system. Check ownerships!

As I said, it is not an easy task! These are two ways, I would do it. Maybe 
there are other ways, but downgrade a whole system ist not often documented in 
the web. 

And thius descriptions above are mor my personal ideas!

Good luck!

Hans



 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
> version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
> 
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
> 
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
> a while is a good idea.
> 
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
> there one?
> 
> Pétùr

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#182126

On Tue, Jun 13, 2017 at 12:05:19PM +0200, Pétùr wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
> version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
> 
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
> 
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
> a while is a good idea.
> 
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
> there one?

Downgrading packages works most of the time for most packages,
but it is completely unsupported.

Since you are not in a hurry, the safest option would be to follow
buster until it becomes stable in mid-2019.

A faster option would be to switch to stretch (which will become stable 
in a few days) right now, and then search and downgrade the few packages
where unstable currently contains a more recent version than stretch.
No longer following upstream would be urgent in this case, since 
unstable is expected to get huge changes starting next week.

> Pétùr

cu
Adrian

-- 

       "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
        of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
       "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
                                       Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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#182128

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

UTC Time: June 13, 2017 10:05 AM
From: peturvilj@gmail.com

Hi everyone,

I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.

If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.

1 Switch your repos to stretch (stable any minute now) and progressively
it may catch up. With synaptic on the preferences you can force it to
prefer stretch over anything else. Officially it should not be done, but at this
point and instance sid is not far from stretch due to the long freeze.
Eventually when stretch's version of the package exceeds that of your
current system it will upgrade. In a few months you will probably be
all stretch'ed out and stable!
You can install stretch's linux-kernel alongside with the sid's and boot from
both and run all packages you have essential to your work. Either leave
them both (but higher will be the default) or after you see that everything
works with 4.9 delete the 4.10
Don't forget to add again the security.debian.org repository which does
not exist in sid.

I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
a while is a good idea.

The default is that it only upgrades to a package with a higher version
number. If your system is running fine there should be no need to
reinstall stretch. Now Jessie is a different animal.

I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
there one?

Proper no, official no, but trust me it works but hurry up before stretch
becomes stable as there would be two systems away from sid.

Pétùr

(AK)

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#182130

On 13-06-17, Pétùr wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
> version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
> 
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
> 
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
> a while is a good idea.
> 
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
> there one?
> 
> Pétùr
> 

Theoretically, if you put all your sources to stable and pin stable with
Pin-Priority of 1001 all your packages will be downgraded to stable
version. But it is not supported and you can expect some breakage while
doing it. As for new install, you can do dpkg --get-selections >
package.list, to backup your selection of packages and later restore it
with dpkg --set-selections < package.list, followed with apt-get
dselect-upgrade. There are also methods with aptitude and apt-mark to
backup list of packages, that can get you separated lists of auto
installed packages and manually installed packages.

As for backup of home, you can exclude things that you think might cause
problem on your new stable install. So, just backup important stuff like
your personal data and some config files that you know will work when
downgraded, live vimrc, muttrc and stuff. You probably want to exclude
various config files of desktop environments and stuff like that.

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#182132

Pétùr wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
> version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
>
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
>
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
> a while is a good idea.
>
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
> there one?

  i think the easiest way to do this is to
make a new install of stable and not do any
rsync of the home at all.  instead back up 
the old home directory and the various dot 
files and then only do manual comparisons 
between versions so that i'm only working 
with stable versions of files.

  in many cases you may not have to change
much.

  another approach would be to create a new
user and then if you do make a rsync copy of
the original you can compare the one home
against the other to see what is different.


  songbird

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#182137

[Multipart message — attachments visible in raw view] — view raw

Hello,

Reading this, I have a question along these lines: back when we're 
unfrozen, and migration from sid to testing to stable was more linear, I 
encounter the same problem (I was on sid, and wanted to migrate to 
something more stable).  I solved this for myself by pointing my sources 
to testing and waiting (for 15 months or so) for testing to become 
stable (in less than a week now...).

Can anyone comment on the efficacy and pitfalls surrounding this method?

One clear one is that I'm not getting security updates.  Given the 
circumstances, this is not too troubling, as my uptime is 2 hours a week 
(when I back up to the machine in question, else it's off and 
unplugged....).

If what I did was "hijack the thread", please accept my apologies and 
let me know, so I don't do it again....

Cheers!

On 06/13/2017 06:05 AM, Pétùr wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the unstable
> version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
>
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
>
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update during
> a while is a good idea.
>
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this. Is
> there one?
>
> Pétùr
>

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#182167

On Tue, 13 Jun 2017 12:05:19 +0200 Pétùr <peturvilj@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I have a computer which does not need anymore to be running the
> unstable version. I would like to migrate it to stable at some point.
> 
> If I backup the home and rsync it on a new installation of Debian
> stable, I will have problems with the downgrade of softwares settings.
> 
> I am not in a hurry and could slowly migrate to stable. But I am not
> sure changing the repositories to stable and wait with no update
> during a while is a good idea.
> 
> I could not think of a proper (and somehow automatic) way to do this.
> Is there one?

I know you don't want to hear this, but I think your safest and least
troublesome option is a clean install of Stretch (when it goes
Stable) leaving your Sid /home partition untouched or backing it up and
reinstalling it.

B

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