Downgrade a package in Ubuntu

There are times when you want to use an earlier version of a package in Ubuntu. Perhaps due to a bug in the latest bleeding edge package that is currently in use. Or maybe the behavior has changed in the new version and you want to revert to an older version. How do you go about doing this? There are various ways to re-install an earlier version. And the steps I describe below is one such approach.

Update all packages

First, before you install a new version of any package, update the list of available packages

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ sudo aptitude -y update

Find out the version of the target package currently installed

I’m currently on Ubuntu 9.10 (karmic) and say I want to downgrade upstart package. The version of upstart that comes with karmic is 0.6.3-11. You can find out the version of an installed package using aptitude show <package-name> command

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ aptitude show upstart

Find out the versions that are available for installation
Next, we find out the versions of upstart that are available. You can do this via the apt-cache command.

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ apt-cache policy upstart

The above output shows an available earlier version 0.6.3-10 that we could use to replace the 0.6.3-11 version.

The above apt-cache policy output is very concise. You can get a little more detail using the apt-cache show command:

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ apt-cache show upstart

Install an older version

Now that we know we have upstart 0.6.3-10 available, we can go ahead an install it to replace version 0.6.3-11.
We do this using the command aptitude install <package-name>=<version>

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ sudo aptitude install upstart=0.6.3-10

As you can see from the output, the package manager downgrades the package. If you want to you can confirm the installed version next.

Verify version

Run aptitude show to check the version of the package installed.

roshan@ubuntuWorker2:~$ aptitude show upstart

Note that the above is one approach to downgrading a package. If you use a GUI, you could use Synaptic Package Manager and pick the version and downgrade.

In the approach described above, if you run aptitude safe-upgrade, the package manager will download and install the candidate version displayed in the apt-cache policy command. In our example case above, that would be upstart 0.6.3-11.
To prevent this from happening, you could set up pinning. See here.

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