How would I go from Aptosid to Debian testing and would I still be able to maintain the system with smxi?

Could I delete aptosid.list and change my debian sources from unstable to testing and wait until the repositories catch up?

I thought I remembered reading a howto on the subject on this forum some time ago but I couldn't find it anymore ...
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why go to testing? if you want to ditch aptosid, just get rid of the aptosid repositories and you can stick with pure sid, and keep it maintained with smxi.

i have been using sid for more than a year now, on two different boxes, and it works fine for me
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I've been running Aptosid since the beginning and Sidux for quite some time before that, and I have to admit that it worked out quite ok, mostly thanks to h2 I must say because smxi saved my a#s a few times.
But then I had a problem with libdbus recently which left me with an unusable computer for more than a day, and since pretty much everything in my house revolves around this pc I was left without music or anything until I could connect with another pc to research what I would have to do to fix the issue - if fixable at all.

This made me think that, unlike some years ago where I really loved digging into the internals of linux, now I just want something that works whenever I need it to work, without hassle, and at the same time I like fairly recent software...
So testing seemed like a good choice, fairly up-to-date and more stable that Sid ...
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I've just recently done this. I can safely say so far so good. (aptosid to sid). Just use smxi to keep things updated and pay attention to warnings, what's going to be removed, and such. It never hurts to check the upgrade warning sections at aptosid. They're usually pretty good about that stuff.
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I've done this, it's not as easy as you think.

Step one, remove all aptosid packages,



Then remove the apt sources for aptosid.

Then change the sid sources to testing, or, alternately, add testing sources and pin the system to testing in apt preferences file.

This latter option lets you install individual packages from sid while retaining a testing base.

Now you want to downgrade all the core packages to testing versions.

What happens over time is that you will get consistent apt-get dist-upgrade failures that are resolved by installing explicitly the packages that caused the break, often things like mysql, any server, any core utilities, etc.

I found it took about one year before the previously sid system was comfortably testing, though you could force it by looping through all the packages and reinstalling them from testing.
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Yes I want to reiterate I did NOT go from aptosid to testing but just to pure sid. I cannot imagine the headaches from going from sid to testing.

I used the exact command h2 posted and purged all the aptosid stuff. So far so good on four systems. (3 laptops and 1 desktop).
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Anyone who is conscious about what apt tells them and who can not panic at a break after changing to testing base and who can pin to testing and who can install or reinstall using the the apt -t option can downgrade.

All I did was do the initial pin, so I could keep some packages that are only in Sid, then do my full-upgrade.

Note: the LONGER since your last upgrade the better, that means most of hte packages wlll be testing versions on your system.

Much of this is strictly empirical, for example, I never tested this:

aptitude -t testing full-upgrade

would that work? Might.

Then do an initial reinstall of your core packages, your desktop, and a few other key items.

Then do a full-upgrade/dist-upgrade, fix the things that break. Repeat over the next few months, and after a while your old Sid system will be running happy as a clam as testing.

Anyone who cannot figure out how to do this process and the steps above I listed should NOT try it, it's not hard, it just requires some basic Debian system management skills, so I'd say it's quite safe to observe that if any of the steps above seem complicated or mystical, do not try it. Or do, and learn a bunch more about how Debian really works. Answer: it really works really well.

If you use apt-get, you can literally loop through all your installed packages, one by one, after you run the dist-upgrade, and reinstall them all from testing. Note that not all packages are in testing, some never leave Sid. That's why I leave the Sid sources active.

For some reason I find that -t testing does not always work as intended, so I use:
aptitude install packagename/testing
instead.
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Allright, thanks.
I don't know if i will be able to deal with the breakages and I don't know whether I have the necessary Debian system-management skills but the things you list don't seem too complicated and I will try.

First I'm gonna backup everything though :-)
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Deach posted above (10:10 UTC) that he accomplished this using a command posted by h2. Can someone please point me to that post? I'd like to see what pure sid is like.
Thank you.
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Complete thread:
techpatterns.com/forums/about1818.html
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