vlc is broken after upgrading

[Giles Orr]

On 16 June 2010 11:06, William O'Higgins Witteman
<william.ohiggins-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I dist-upgraded my Debian testing system yesterday, and now I cannot
> view video files.  It appears that the upgrade of libva to version
> 1.0.3-1 has killed all non-Flash video on my machine.  I know that there
> is no simple way to downgrade via apt (the Achilles heel of Debian,
> IMO), but is there another way to sort this sort of thing out?  Do I
> remove the offending package and reinstall the previous, non-broken
> library?  Any advice would be welcome.  Thanks!

Debian testing recently pushed an mpg321 package that segfaulted on
play for all songs on certain platforms - it certainly affected me on
amd64.  I looked it up on google and discovered that the problem with
the package had been found while the package was on unstable, and had
been patched.  Then they'd pushed the broken one to testing - good
plan.  So I ended up downloading the "unstable" mpg321 package by hand
and installing it - worked fine.  This is a possible solution for you,
but only if the unstable vlc is a) different, b) working and c)
doesn't require a cascade of library changes.

When I started using Debian testing as my primary distro six or seven
years ago I had a lot less problems with it: in the last eight or nine
months testing has been pushing a lot of shoddy packages, and it's
been making me pretty unhappy.  I realize it's called "testing"
because it's NOT "stable," but past history and stability has raised
my expectations.  And I really, really don't want to go to "stable":
too much of it is too old - so I guess I suffer with testing or change
distros ...

I absolutely agree that apt's inability to roll back packages is a
weakness (still better than rpm/yum though, although the latter has
improved).  I'd like to be able to run "full-upgrade" frequently to
maintain the security of my system, but back out the occasional
problem package.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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