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What is the best, or most suitable, method of downgrading packages in Arch?
On normal days I just run the following to accomplish a quick downgrade:
# pacman -Rd <broken-package>
# pacman -U <older-stable-package-pkg.tar.gz>
But today I am downgrading my kernel, which is a very vital part of my linux life. I'd like to do it correctly.
Is this the proper way? If not, what is?
Generally speaking unless there is a dep depending on it (in which case leaving it that way would break something), pacman -U <older-stable-package-pkg.tar.gz> will do the job correctly. Also you should avoid -Rd when doing things that could break your system unless You know what you are doing, because otherwise the system will complain if you're trying to downgrade in a way that will break a dependency.
If you have packages with a newer version (i.e. testing) and you want to downgrade in batch to stable version, you can execute the following pacman commands:
# pacman -Syy
# pacman -Suu
/etc/pacman.conf first. Otherwise, this will not downgrade anything...
Jun 30, 2011 at 18:32
pacman -Syy force syncs the db against the repos in pacman.conf - unless you change pacman.conf nothing will be donwgraded. Read man pacman for details.
Jul 12, 2011 at 18:26
pacman -Suu. You don't need to change pacman.conf. You shall have more than one version of packages in repos to get pacman -Suu working. If you have only one version of every package pacman -Suu is useless, of course. pacman -Suu downgrades to the lower version of packages in the repos.
man pacman: -Su: "Pass this option twice to enable package downgrade; in this case pacman will select sync packages whose version does not match with the local version. This can be useful when the user switches from a testing repo to a stable one." That seems clear to me.
Jul 13, 2011 at 9:10