Etch and Lenny mixed up!
 

Hya,

After a kind of long (and stupid) story, my Debian penguin got chimera. (mix of lenny and etch)

Question is: Will my chimera penguin stay healthy?

Is there any way to roll back to etch penguin?

There are several threads about unable to roll back, http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=560223
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=391217

Several files did downgrade following force removal by dpkg and reinstalling, and many dependency were taken care of by aptitude. However, ncurses-base and several others cannot be done same way.
aptitude dist-upgrade does not take care of anything.

Any idea, suggestion will be appreciated.

Happy penguins!

Identify key packages, remove them, then install the version you want
 

It is most certainly possible to run a multiply sourced distribution, but the more stuff you mix, the more likelihood of conflicts. I have run a combination of stable, testing, and Sid before and I do not run into issues very often. When I do, I simply note the package conflicts, note them, completely remove them, then install a version that supports all of the dependent packages I am interested in. Rarely does the situation get bad enough that I have to start over, but on several occasions I have had to replace entire subsystems. For example, I have replaced all of XF86 (or more recently X.org) and KDE.

Replacing libc6 has a way of causing a whole cascade of other activity. If you use the Sid version of it, this will cause a large percentage of your system to run Sid. I've done that and it works fine in well over 95% of the cases. I do keep a backup system around. If the mixed system acts up, often I just wait a few days and try again and update again. Rarely does a week go by where things don't work. When that does happen, I just go backward and run Testing, which has never failed to work.

So far, my penguin stays healthy.

Following I did to reestablish pure etch penguin.

1. get all package list from following site http://packages.debian.org/stable/allpackages
2. get all installed package list using "dpkg-query -l"
3. compare these two lists, look for newer than supposed to be files, use aptitude to install old one, or force install old one using dpkg. Tiny shell script would help.

Happy Penguins!

Edit++

Some dependency was screwed up, such as window manager needs xorg, xorg needs font. Just install whatever instinctively necessary.