[CentOS] yum install <olderversion> does not downgrade

[Mark Haney]

Personally, I would do one of three things:

1. Use the -m command to run 'yum install <version>' which /might/ work.

2. Uninstall the newer package and install the version you want. (Check 
the 'state' directive to do this.)

3. Pin that package version when creating the server/VM so as not to be 
updated.

#3 is useful to us as we kickstart all our servers and VMs, and this 
eliminates the problem going forward.  Then, when we're ready to upgrade 
the pinned package, we have an ansible playbook that unpins that 
version, installs the new version (even if not latest), then re-pins.

HTH.


On 06/01/2017 03:46 PM, Anand Buddhdev wrote:
> We're using ansible to configure our CentOS 6 servers, and we have a
> task to install a specific version of a package:
>
> - name: install thrift2
>    yum: name=ripencc-thrift2-{{ version }}
>
> In this ansible task, the "version" variable is set by the operator.
> When we want to upgrade, it works. But today we had to downgrade, and
> noticed that ansible wasn't downgrading it. So we tried by hand (the
> installed version was 1.0.8):
>
> # yum install ripencc-thrift2-1.0.3
>
> I don't have the output handy, because a colleague was working on it,
> but basically, yum said something like "package already installed" and
> refused to downgrade it, even though the package is in our repository.
>
> I have a strong sense that yum _used to_ downgrade packages if asked to
> install an older version, but perhaps I am misremembering.
>
> Nevertheless, I want to ask: is this a bug in yum? If asked to install a
> specific version, should it not upgrade OR downgrade as needed?
>
> Regards,
> Anand
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