How to downgrade a package on debian etch?

[der.hans]

Am 05. May, 2007 schwätzte Mark Phillips so:

> There seems to be a bug in rdesktop that causes a segmentation fault quite

Have you tried tsclient or another RDP client?

> often, which makes the program hard to use. In the Debian bug tracking
> system, it has been traced back to an upgrade of the package libx11-6 from
> version 1.0.3-6 to 1.0.3-7. The rdesktop folks are working on a fix for
> rdesktop (the patches floating around the net seem to still have issues), but
> in the meantime I still need to use rdesktop, and the segmentation faults are
> getting annoying.
>
> I need to downgrade libx11-6 to version 1.0.3-6. I tried the following and it
> did not work:
>
> 1. Edited /etc/apt/preferences to look like this:
>
> Package: libx11-6
> Pin: version 1.0.3-6
> Pin-Priority: 1001

That would get the downgrade if it were available.

> Package: *
> Pin release a=testing
> Pin-Priority: 800
>
> Package: *
> Pin release a=stable
> Pin-Priority: 600
>
> 2. I then did an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade. I thought this might
> downgrade the package, but it didn't.
>
> 3. I then tried apt-get install libx11-6=1.0.3-6 and got this error message:
>
> Reading package lists... Done
> Building dependency tree... Done
> E: Version '1.0.3-6' for 'libx11-6' was not found

The version you want isn't in the repositories.

Do you have unstable, testing and stable in your sources.list?

apt-cache show libx11-6 | grep ^Version

That'll show you what's available. Perhaps there's another version you can
grab.

> I searched the Debian site and could not find the older libx11-6 package for
> i386. Is there a repository somewhere with older versions of packages? My
> hunch is that I need to add an entry in my sources.list for a repository of
> the older version. Google did not come up with any obvious choices.

Grab the package from somewhere and toss it in /var/cache/apt/archives.
Check that for an older version before looking any further, but if you had
the package in the package cache it should just install it.

Perhaps those of us who run debian can see if we've got it cached.

ls /var/cache/apt/archives/libx11-6*

/var/cache/apt/archives/libx11-6_4.3.0.dfsg.1-14sarge3_i386.deb is what I
have on my debian boxen.

> Also, am I doing this whole package downgrade process correctly? Is there a
> better way?

It looks like it.

Check out cafod. I haven't looked at it in a couple of years, but I think
it's still mostly accurate. I should likely update it to mention using
aptitude.

http://www.LuftHans.com/unix/docs/HOWTO/cafod.txt

ciao,

der.hans
-- 
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