I really should study the apt howto for an answer to this question, but I think it's a very easy answer for someone who knows. So allow me a bit of laziness.

In a moment of panic, I upgraded my 32 bit system from Etch to Sid. Nothing obvious is broken, and Gnome 2.12 sure is pretty. On the other hand, I'm not really a bleeding-edge person. This is my question:

If I simply change my sources.list back to testing and do my normal weekly apt-get upgrade, will the system gradually move itself back to Etch as 'unstable' packages are moved to 'testing'?

Hi,

Change your sources.list to sarge then

apt-get update
apt-get -s upgrade

That will simulate downgrading and let you know what would happen. It shouldn't change anything on your machine. It'll give you an idea what it would do if you ran it for real.

There are many links on google about downgrading Debian.

http://groups.google.com/group/linux...f71a2bd2f179a0

It is not officially supported but many have made it to work.

I went to etch after sarge became stable. I didn't change my sources.list. I ended up with sid because I wanted k3b again. Very few problems and I use it every day on my main computer.

Good luck,
Steve

Yes eventually you will end up running everything from testing the only problem you may run into is if for some reason or other in the required 10 days in unstable for a package to move to testing there is another upload in the mean time by the maintainer then another package that requires it moves into testing the version you need would not be available to be installed because it would have been replaced by the new one.

I think I can work around that. Thanks.