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I just wanted to do a regular upgrade on my Debian Wheezy system. I did the usual

$ sudo apt-get update $ sudo apt-get upgrade

I noticed that the number of packages to be upgraded was pretty large but I just hit Y and proceeded with the upgrade. To my astonishment, after the upgrade was finished, I found out that I now have a Debian 8 system.

So, is it possible that a simple upgrade has performed a dist-upgrade? As far as I understood, upgrade should never perform a distribution upgrade but only upgrade packages for the current distribution. Or am I missing something?

Here is my sources.list file:

deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main deb http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main deb-src http://security.debian.org/ wheezy/updates main # wheezy-updates, previously known as 'volatile' deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main deb-src http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-updates main # wheezy-backports deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ wheezy-backports main contrib non-free deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free # debian multimedia non-free deb http://www.deb-multimedia.org wheezy main non-free # xtreemfs deb http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/xtreemfs/Debian_7.0 ./ # MariaDB 5.5 repository list - created 2015-03-29 20:56 UTC # http://mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories/ deb http://mirror2.hs-esslingen.de/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main deb-src http://mirror2.hs-esslingen.de/mariadb/repo/5.5/debian wheezy main

Anyway, is it possible to revert the system to a clean wheezy system in some way?

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The

deb ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main contrib non-free

line in your sources.list means you're tracking stable, not wheezy; since jessie became stable last weekend you switched to Jessie.

The distinction between upgrade and dist-upgrade isn't related to performing "distribution" upgrades or not; apt-get doesn't actually really know you're changing distributions. The distinction is that upgrade won't remove packages, whereas dist-upgrade might if necessary. (The dist-upgrade does come from the fact that it's what should be used when upgrading the full distribution.)

Fixing your upgrade and reverting to Wheezy isn't supported; Debian packages aren't required to downgrade properly.

You should fix your sources.list to use a named version though rather than stable, to avoid such surprises in the future.

If you do want to try downgrading, specify wheezy instead of stable in sources.list. Then install apt-show-versions and use that to find packages which need downgrading; packages can be downgraded by installing them from wheezy, for example

apt-get install libc6/wheezy

(Don't start with libc6 though, that will be one of the last packages you can downgrade.)

I'd recommend sticking with Jessie though!

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  • The stable line was a copy-and-paste from some documentation. I'll have to be more careful in the future. Of course I would like to upgrade to jessie, but I want to do it properly (after performing an appropriate backup of configuration files). Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 22:01
  • I understand perfectly that you'd want to upgrade properly, but it's now too late to backup your configuration files, at least as they were in Wheezy — the unintended upgrade to Jessie will have changed some of them, and downgrading won't restore them. Check out etckeeper for future reference! Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 22:05
  • My system has not been upgraded properly: several packages that were installed (e.g. mariadb) are no longer available. I think I will install jessie to a free partition and start from scratch. Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 22:08
  • Anyway, thanks for the explanations and the tips. etckeeper seems a great tool. Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 22:09
  • You're welcome! MariaDB came from their repository, and they don't have a Jessie repository yet; but their Sid repository has a good chance of still being compatible with Jessie, so you could always try that. Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 22:13

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