[CentOS] How to downgrade gtk2 libs in CentOS 6.8?

Mon Jan 9 13:54:04 UTC 2017
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>

On Jan 9, 2017, at 4:08 AM, Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org> wrote:
>  Hi all.  I'm using a CentOS 6.8 VM to do volunteer builds for an open
> source project.  I want to build Pale Moon with a gtk2 library older
> than 2.24, to allow people with older linuxes to run it.  Short summary,
> if built against version gtk2-2.24 and/or higher, the binary will use a
> function that does not exist in gtk2-2.23 and lower.  Net result is that
> the program dies with an "undefined symbol:" error for people with
> machines lower than gtk2-2.24.  Yes, before you ask, they do get
> security fixes backported.
> 
>  The hits from my Google search suggested...
> 
> yum downgrade gtk2
> 
>  The response from yum was...
> 
> Only Upgrade available on package: gtk-2.24.23-8.e16.i686
> Nothing to do
> 
>  Are there ways around this?


I suggest building the software using mock chroots, built against older versions of CentOS.  You can set up custom chroots in /etc/mock/.  

For example, I have staged versions of CentOS7 (with staged yum repos) that I use to build kernel modules, so I can build the latest version of OpenAFS against kernels other than the latest, since our environment’s kernels don’t get updated immediately but I will still need to have OpenAFS kmods.  You could do something similar, only pointing the yum repos at vault.centos.org <http://vault.centos.org/> repos.

--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>