Bug#426371: upgrades etch system to sid, breaks entire installation

[Steinar H. Gunderson]

Package: update-manager
Version: 0.42.2ubuntu22-11
Severity: critical

Hi,

My mother (who runs a pristine Etch desktop) complained today that her
machine was suddenly getting slow. After a restart, the X server refused
to run.

A bit of investigation over ssh showed that for a while, her machine was
not running Etch at all, but sid -- she's upgrading via update-manager
whenever it tells her to, and judging from the dpkg logs (doesn't
update-manager have any logs on its own?) it's been happily upgrading
her system to recent sid for a while.

Now, here's the interesting part: /etc/apt/sources.list does not contain
anything about unstable, nor sid. Nor does any apt package lists I've
been able to find, nor the software-properties applet. Yet, there were
hundreds of packages that needed manual downgrading, and dpkg.log does
indeed show upgrading from one sid version of xserver-xorg to another as
late as today.

For the time being, I've asked her to ignore update-manager, but I don't
think this is an acceptable sitution in etch. :-)

-- System Information:
Debian Release: lenny/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.22-rc1 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=nb_NO.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages update-manager depends on:
ii  libgnome2-perl              1.040-1      Perl interface to the GNOME librar
pn  lsb-release                 <none>       (no description available)
ii  python                      2.4.4-6      An interactive high-level object-o
pn  python-apt                  <none>       (no description available)
ii  python-glade2               2.10.4-2     GTK+ bindings: Glade support
ii  python-gnome2               2.18.2-1     Python bindings for the GNOME desk
pn  python-gnupginterface       <none>       (no description available)
ii  python-support              0.6.4        automated rebuilding support for p
ii  synaptic                    0.57.11.1+b2 Graphical package manager

update-manager recommends no packages.