[CentOS] YUM and installing older versions of software.

Thu Jun 19 17:08:33 UTC 2008
MHR <mhullrich at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 2:25 AM, Laurence Alexander Hurst
<L.A.Hurst at lboro.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I've spent some time struggling with this issue too. The current version of
> yum will let you specify an older version (as detailed in the man page) and
> install it - but you then have to be very careful with your `yum update`s to
> avoid accidentally upgrading it. Once you have a later version installed you
> cannot, currently, downgrade it - the only way to install an older version
> "over" an existing version is to remove the package and then explicitly
> install the older version, and this can result in some nasty dependency
> issues.
>

Avoiding accidental updates is as easy as putting exclusion rules in
your yum repo files.  I do this routinely to prevent my OOo 2.4.1 from
getting overwritten by (and me getting notices for) "newer" revisions
of older base versions.  (Exclusion rules don't care which way the
update would go, up or down.)

mhr